Photo: Untitled, Michael Howarth (2022)

Sigmund Freud sez:
                       Paranoia is stored in the mind,
The mind of someone who lovehates another man.

It is in this contradiction of ‘I love him, no, I hate him,’
                       That one begins to act like Judge Schreber,
                                               Whose arse had a lightsabre.

Do I contradict Freud? No, I contradict Walt Whitman,
                       Very well that I contradict
That beautiful man

           With starry blue eyes like a welkin turning,
Like a candle burning,
                       Like a lover yearning.

                       There are multitudinous erotomaniacs
Running around with roses in their mouths,
                                   And a lute to serenade.

                                               Pour rien, pour l’Amour, pour La Mort,
                                   For nothing, for Love, for Death…
                       And with a lover’s breath you’ll see love’s death.

Psychoanalyses find love to be the twin of paranoia,
           Typewritten love letters are dangerous,
                       The first to be typewritten like
                                       The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

There’s love inside the demented minds of dead souls,
           These dead souls for whom the bell tolls its untimely knell,
                       And we all drown in the funerary bell.

And like Aridaeus, we’re down in a beehive
                       Deep inside the buzzing of some insectoid hell,
Lovers go there to die like Persephone’s pomegranate hued smile.
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