PSYCHO DRUMBEAT.

The Drummer’s beat incessant, spits the rhythm straight and narrow,
words, unheard and lifeless are eulogised as tarot.
Yet he looks beyond time for shifting, shapeless shadows.

Syncopated breaths of hope stay the rages of maniac and hysteric.
Poison promises grey the images that haunt the gaunt psychotic.
And sweetened threats soothe the breasts of the aggressive and pathetic.

Synchronous tangled constructs from the baton of a haughty maestro stretch from preach to conjure.
Electric nightmares, crazy visions stir dismal thoughts to uproar.
And they waft through solid marchers purging life of soul and ardour.

Psycho metronomes thrum the beat beguile, confuse, disarm.
Bewildering time signatures, polemical chemicals befuddle with medical charm.
then helectical dialectics and therapeutical semantics bemuse more than calm.

Elixirs, pills and potions and the madness will succumb,
the hordes who danced all out of step now march to a single drum,
cured, repaired, brain washed, every single one.

AND THE PATIENT RESPONDS:

They gave me a rhythm, called it healing

a four-four beat of compliance

wrapped in a pill, with breakfast.

Said my jazz was noise. Said my fugues were fugitive.

Said my syncopation threatened

their straight lines of service provision.

But I remember a time

when the dissonance danced me.

When my madness sang

in unscripted arpeggios,

when my pain made paintings

no prescription could match.

Then came the notes in triplicate,

tick-boxed and anonymised,

each a lullaby of neatness

with all the tremors ironed out.

The drumbeat now lives behind my teeth,

clicking with every polite smile.

A metronome stitched to my spine.

I walk to it.

I nod to it.

I lie to it.

They called it “stabilised.”

I call it

“waiting.”

Waiting for the break.

For the offbeat.

For the stray chord.

For a wandering melody that reminds me

I once danced barefoot in the firelight

of my own disobedience.

They say: “The rhythm is your saviour.”

I whisper: “No.

The silence between the beats

was where I found my salvation .”