Madness nestles in vessels of blood

and you don’t fault a fellow for a fever

or blame  a wagon for its broken wheel.

 

How his first-born disappoints him!

Drinking and dicing, duelling, murder;

plunging to polar melancholia

on his Moral and Physical Thermometer.

 

Sanity breeds in regular habits -

bleeding, purging, mercury, emetics;  

the aptitude to judge like other men.

 

Escorted home, cobwebbed and uncombed,

no tongue or eye for kith and kin;

he sighs night winds to the rhythm of waves,

as familiar as The King of Babylon.

 

Heresy, buggery, murder and theft

are bodily diseases oozing out

of every incautious orifice.

 

Father, doctor, shrink and gaoler

confines him in his institution

to pace Lear-like for twenty-seven years

and wear deep gutters in the basement stone.

 

A hospital bed or a prison cell?

The Gyrator and the Tranquiliser

are gentler than the stake or noose.

 

He came home once and was somewhat better;

six days later he returned much worse.

Father’s footsteps were too long, yet too narrow;

madness nestles in vessels of blood.