I prayed for madness
And when madness came I thought for a while there
I am become a god
For my prayer had been answered
And since I was a real that is a manmade god
And not the inexistent omnipotent creator of the universe
I set about suffering and dying
In the venerable agricultural cycle
Of regret anxiety revision reassurance and contrition
So having lapsed now into testimony
I hereby disclose that I was motivated
By a certain means-ends calculation
Namely that madness would crack open
A mold into which I had been poured
Partly through my own neglect
Partly through the operations of others
But mostly through the machinic routines
Of punctuality input output and degree
Hence a program contradictory from the get-go
And I hoped to accomplish the liberating
Of the shaping power of imagination
Now lying inert
Through romantic derangement
Not conveniently attainable in this decadent age
And so instead I underwent unremarkable psychopathology
Though in my clouded frame I regarded this episode
As apotheosis
And instead of effusions gave forth symptoms
Intelligible to any objective observer
The depressive’s musings and sonneteering
The manic’s talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk
The obsessive’s enumerations and futile exertions toward comprehensiveness
ADD follies fish bicycle Mona Lisa lath and plaster wattle and daub

Nevertheless just as in sanity
The pathogen waits of insanity
So too lucidity shines in the mad shadows
And happy is he who carries out that light
That’s right I said happy
For even now as I sit upright and take nourishment
I relish the force of eight lines plus six
The tranquil counting of twelve breaths and five
The catalogues of my own device in the locus amoenus
And the rush of shapes the horrid and the beautiful
From the deep well of and so forth