Truth is, Doctor

Psychiatry – strange casuistry: to seek relief

within parameters it sets for psychic pain,

and paint with Rembrandt’s density and shadow

prospects of a Paradise regained – not of

the brain – but what it colonizes as the habitable

shores along what it conspires to define as

ineradicable channels of desire. Mired far from

any fire, safe in all its cool consuming mud,

as distant from the blood as outside layers of

a blubbered life preserver are from human skin,

and sin: pitting all its powers on a reasoned

conquest of “within”: quite a spin – or fetid swamp –

but hampered surely by the end-line dumpster

looming huge as we abandon every last refuge

and near the final Stop from where and when

we can't remember we had been at Go.

Truth is, Doctor, I don't want to know.

.