RASPBERRY DONE

(pun on “risperidone,” an antipsychotic)

Raspberry Done

a long sonnet sequence I must publish before the world ends

1.   Kabbalah Casualty

At risk to scatter mind and soul, he dared

To touch the esoteric coal fire hid

Between the glowing lines of Hebrew, scared,

Yet compelled to find out what it did.

What it did was fry his circuitry

Until the fuse of cleverness was blown.

He toured the cities like a casualty

Exhibiting his wounds in every town.

Amused, they asked the adept why had he

gone up and tempted Ein Sof premature

When otherworldly vengeance was so sure.

He said, "I've always skipped the ladder's rungs

That others climb, mimed the secret tongues

That chilly rabbis teach like alchemy."

2.

That I have climbed the mystic temple spire,

That I have similarly read the books,

That I have put my hand in holy fire,

That I have dared to steal forbidden looks,

Is true as with the impatient Kabbalist--

And yet while true, it wasn't anything

But made up with my intellect's assist,

A transcendental wasp without a sting.

I have always been suggestible, it seems.

I'm suckered by my own imagination,

Like the kid at magic shows who thinks

The smiling woman's sawed in half. My dreams

Trespass my conscious hour's location:

and doubtful notions form persuasive links.

3.

To those who wonder what this madness meant,

The matter's not too hard to illustrate.

See how I learned the secret when I went

To 12 step meetings where I heard a man narrate

How in a Cleveland alley he'd "been stabbed

To death." I took him at his word.

It had the sound of spectral secrets blabbed,

Of things that to me never had occurred.

If he were dead (I reasoned out) yet breathed

The same air I into my nostrils drew,

By logical induction it was bequeathed 

To me to see, like him, I was dead too. 

Innocent and credulous, forsaken,

I with death's true pattern was mistaken.

4.

How did I die then? I don't know. Car crash

Or overdose, it was concealed from me.

In spite of all its superficial flash

And daily gambit of vitality

The universe was giving somber nods;

like a detective, I was fast amassing

Evidence of celestial facades.

In the instant right before the passing,

Consciousness and memory's removed

By Malebranche's busy editors,

Who leave a gap in every tape that proved

The expiration happened. Angels used

Their reach to scramble knowledge; worse,

Erased the point of death with segments fused.

5.

Sleep was putrefaction in this world:

To eat food is by rote to go through motions.

Routine daily life is there unfurled,

False smiles, false triumphs, false emotions.

Everyone I came across, including

Family members, was a marionette

Conspiring with each other and colluding

To keep me ignorant of the stage set.

Their gazes seemed to hold significance,

As if they knew they played a clever role

In the deception. People wore such faces,

All matched to letters on a Hebrew scroll,

So a sidewalk full of them retraces

Scrambled sentences I read by chance.

6.

It is a variant of solipsism

To think of living death in quite this fashion.

To see all colors through a morbid prism

Somehow threatens to become a passion.

Doubting evidence that there are others

Living life in your peripherals,

Rejecting sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers

As if they're holograms without a pulse

Is similar to doubting that a net

Will catch your body in a high-wire act.

Instead you'll fall into an oubliette

Of faulty sense perceptions: how abstract.

It isn't true that people are not there.

Pretend effigies: would that they were.

7.

A mesh of clues began to surface then,

Like encoded messages from spies,

To let me know my frightened suspicion

Was merited. And something often tries

To knock the blinders from the corpse's vision,

Through lyrics on the radio--like "yeah,"

a chanted answer to the mental quizzing,

when I had thought: "did I disappear?"

Other proofs were carefully occulted.

Logos stitched on clothing held some sign,

And from this fabrication then resulted

A web of horrifying elegance.

The thoroughness of heavenly design

Was full of back-stops, and I saw no chance.

8.

So I embarked upon a veiled being,

Veiled because no one could pierce through it.

I felt I was the only person seeing

The way that death had marbled life into it.

I'd be called crazy if I tried explaining

My flowchart of misunderstanding souls.

The surface mask of living life was draining

Since I knew what prison God controls.

To lose your mind at death that's taken place

Already and it's just too late for you,

And try to sort it out, to no avail

Since nothing of the process left a trace,

Is like a Swiss schooner sailing through

The Suez with a napkin for a sail. 

9.

Absence of a proper catechism 

Left open all this talk of the hereafter 

Governed by unruly gnosticism,

Picked up like bits at school, before and after.

I pieced together fabric of a fear

That I was lost in dim oblivion.

My curse to die and live and wander here,

Afraid that forces kept me in this zone.

And all from mental illness it had come,

while Dante waited patiently in line

To school me on the path that he had walked

With Virgil on the hike of death. A crumb

Of him I didn't read, no matter how divine

The comedy. My prey, myself, I stalked.

10.

If I had lived in random other places

My tormented predicament would be

A thing with somewhat different faces

According to local theology.

Were I a Hindu I'd have occupied 

A frightening annex of Samsāra where

I’d writhe in cyclical circuit, denied

 Nirvana, like a coral denied air.

If I had been a Catholic I'd see

Myself in purgatory to withstand

Blue flames to burn out sinful roots, preparing

For the upward trip to heaven's land.

Religions are like vessels pouring, sharing

A little measured fluid quantity.

11.

Now that I am rehabilitated,

There's an emptiness, I must confess.

A certain quotient of charm was created

By my febrile mind's device, I guess.

At laughing distance I can speak this now,

The way one mimes the accident's retelling

How goofy autos piled up in slo-mo

And airbags were like cauliflower swelling.

But while it went on all around you then

The terror was your closest passenger,

A lamprey sucking all your oxygen.

Likewise with my fearful cosmic game:

Sure of purgatory's clutches, sure

I rotated above a hidden flame.

12.

The fear of death is still a going worry.

Going through it once, or so I thought,

I do not hope that future deaths will hurry,

Like when a piece of dental work is bought,

You don't want details of the thing repeated.

But then it shatters, and your mouth is full

Of costly shards and fragments. You've been cheated.

Now you must pay again, for real. The toll

Will be a high one. It's the last, you pray.

At the time this was my addled feeling,

Considering the room where I was caught.

Accepting one more dose of doom, I'd say,

Would be extra since the first was sealing--

A casual and painless afterthought.

13.

A casual and painless afterthought,

I did not dread the next demise enough.

Like a deadline passed, that death was moot.

I thought to seize the end and call its bluff.

What's suicide to one who's dead already?

How close to fearsome precipice I veered,

How I walked through the world with thoughts unsteady,

Flirting with abutments how I steered.

I didn't know how serious it was.

I still don't. It's an undiscovered land,

As Shakespeare wrote it. Are you sure of where

You are? Sure that you still breathe because

You chest inflates? What if every gland

Is driven by some demiurge elsewhere?

14.

Just because I see how it's all wrong--

How my epistemology was darkened--

Doesn't mean that therefore I belong

In certain knowledge of the heaven-hearkened.

A reevaluation of the scheme

Does not drive me into a Savior's fetter,

No more than switching to a Christian theme

Would make this doubting poem any better.

I admit that it was like I pushed

Any thought of comfort far away,

And I assumed the stance of one who's crushed

Because at that time it seemed so deserving.

I suppose that's the masochistic way

When staring down a pending fate unnerving.

15.

To spend my hours conceptually flailing

At some seraphic construct holding up

The strut-work of all life and death, inhaling

Mystic heaven-doctrines from a cup,

was to rebel from common thoughts on holy

Not a metaphysics, nor

A movement. How I failed to spread a folie

Á deux, contagious belief for more

Than one, to anyone besides myself.

Time to let go of that old bogeyman.

Time to put the grim books back on their shelf.

The afterlife is not for scrutiny,

is not a layman's hobby, no more than

An earthworm's heed is NASA rocketry.

16.

Preventing neurochemical high tide--

Antagonizing dopamine receipt--

Would seem to be the method to be tried,

Just as it is a practicable conceit.

A decade more or less and I have swallowed

Pills to fight the subtle breaks of reason.

A decade's doctor's orders I have followed.

The tide, like light, goes in and out each season.

The pill's "Raspberry Done," to be exact.

This medication helps me not to be

the hapless victim of some neuron's blunder

(Malbranche again?). It's science and it's fact.

I'm down to earth about it finally.

I know now what is real--and still I wonder.

17.

Is there room to wonder anymore

When wondering is the source of so much fear?

When knowing is the source of sureness for

The paternalistic system reigning here?

My mind's a property that always needed

Custodians to care for it, as though

It were a bank that once last year proceeded

To have a shredded paper overflow.

So now we must be vigilant in case

The deluge should return. But then for now

The bank can't handle paper money due

To fearing that the cash will turn to lace. 

My mental currency will be somehow 

Discontinued, not replaced by new.

18.

I repeat myself but only 'cause I'm trying

To describe evasive concepts, and

The subtle explanations of my dying

Might be easy to misunderstand.

It is a complex, this suspicion creeping

In, nibbling in around the psychic edges.

Days and weeks still seem false, in keeping

With the phantom world that fate alleges.

My mind travels. No matter where it goes,

No matter how, I come to feel quite well

The stillnesses of masquerading time.

A grid of restless intuition grows

Just like the rhizome of the asphodel

Buried in Mediterranean lime.

19.

I think when dead for real I'll give my brain

To science for it to be analyzed,

To understand this ailment. Is that vain?

Patting my own back? How I devised

An intricate psychosis such as this

Is the wonder of the age--to me,

If not to you. So it was my abyss

Where you have solid ground, solidity.

But can't you see how this is my escape,

Or could be, from the twisting nagging fears

That haunt me still, every now and then?

If clinicians could have findings when

Some future person's thoughts take on this shape,

An explanation won't be in arrears.

20.

I think it's possible I could go on

If only I could tap back into that

Fount of necromantic inspiration

That had me scribbling every fleeing thought.

I think the key is to be agitated

And contemplate how chilling is the voice,

That all you annotate is fated

And how in every way you had no choice.

Knowing what this poem might do from here

Provides a sense of scale that frightens me.

So many diamonds could slip through this sieve.

It will test my powers as a seer.

"Seer." This elevated boasting heightens me,

Above a healthy orbit, I believe.