Madness

How does one address madness:

kill it with  a grin

chop it with a machete

poison it with arsenic

address it with love?

When scrunched faces babble, do you hide

lest the idiots devour you like rare hammered meat?

Round and round the foul taste of hatred tests.

The work of Disdain circles our eyes like mesh.

We see through filtering lids 

rosy slits, redirecting the sun.

The hair that's pulled is not ours but theirs.

The extracted teeth are those of fiends

named and disposed.

Violence is sweet, revenge ever souring

shoved 'neath stairs where the morgue is housed.

What we smell is dead

fertilizing the earth as rotting flesh.

What we keep are records of recall

recalling whom to repay

a thousand times to repay.

It's beauty like the blood-strained grass

near the shrapneled trees salted with flesh.  

No one screams, mouths agape

only a whimper to record the pain

as children play among the dead.

Normalcy's their mind-set.

Today's the same each day.

They'll play again tomorrow

with madness and the blood. 

*When I was quite young, with no awareness of the personal demons within me or the different forms and faces those demons could endlessly assume, I developed a belief that the hard work of good, honest, fair-minded people with a passionate commitment to justice would bring about a world in which a life of dignity for all would be the rule.  A world in which opportunities to pursue fulfillment would be limited only by the outer margins of one's individual ability.  I had come to believe that problems of race, ethnicity, color, education, sexual preference, class, and poverty, and the attendant afflictions left in their wake to plague the modern world in their names, would be successfully resolved through the efforts of those same good, honest, fair-minded people.  A new progressive force with insight and cohesion was in the making, thought I.  The ills of my generation would ultimately be addressed.  Frictions would be tamed, tensions neutralized, and out of the hearts and minds of good men and women would come the way to a better future - one in which we would all lend a hand at weaving the strong cultural thread of our social diversity into a more caring, a more human community.

Bullshit!

-Sidney Poitier