(edited by Tim Heffernan & Alise Blayney)
20:20
My world is controlled
By numbers
I see them everywhere
Like some numerologist
Or lost mathematician
Descartes with his planar thought
I’m on the z-axis
But I have no scene for to play
A part
Just an axiom of rhetorical
Penchant’s doing
I’m mooing
And you are doing
Fine
But I could
Be a better 1
If you could 2, only 3 is the number
I plead 4 less 5 is the 6-note and the 7
For heaven
Isn’t 8 it’s 9
Clouds above.
Sell the Kids for Food
Order the next anti-psychotic
I’m not a danger to myself
I’m not a danger to you
But you better put me away
Cos my knife is to your throat
You cut me with your DSM
My veins are blue
But my hands are read-
Y for your kiss of death.
Take this pill and you will feel more yourself
More than who you really are
More than who you know
More than you can believe is right.
Get ready for a fight
Get ready for some control
As they steady your ass
For the jab
The short upper-cut
Stare at the walls
Stripped of your emperor’s
Structural colours
De-robed, dismissed, dis-armed.
Irradiate Me
Nominate me for life
Open the door for laughter
Close it again, when finished with me
Do not know it
But do it too when I see you here
Looking at my words like they are poetry
But really they are new to me
As they all are.
I want to be a poet
But I cannot
So I will be then and there
The free writing agent of the passable
Use of words.
Bruce Saunders is a funky dove in a hip-swinger kind of thing called the rejuvenated part of South Africa in England where he lives with Madiba in his house called the Bat. It is not for you to see but for you to hear as he goes from one to another trying different things in order to get attention for his plight in the Mental Health Industry here where he is empowered by his desire to do the harm he can to the psychiatry that wounded his try at the politics of the day, and he would be grateful if you can read his work and see if you go to the home of the woods without seeing it all as he does. Called the Big B by some, he is the first to know it is found not in the Heart but in the Wrist Action. To read more of Bruce’s work, visit his blog, Too Lonely To Make Sense.