Dream of the Waking Man

[Teratogen]

Dream of the Waking Man

Take the beauty and the truth from thy face,
Unmask the grinning skull there in its place
Whence out of the furrow its threats are charm’d:
Anticipating Death it is disarm’d.

Prisoner of nothingness, twist and writhe;
Your body condemn’d to chains loose and lithe.
Shall thy escape conclude thy master plan,
Vict’ry then belongs to the laughing man.

But continuing in its illusion
Nothingness is not threat, nor conclusion;
About its own madness it gravitates
From wisdom freed in its existing states.

Yet only through wisdom can we unbind
The knots of relationships intertwined,
Self-multiplying, in meaningless rules;
This, a perception: the wisdom of fools.

O, this tragedy—how it overwhelms
As such a confrontation of two realms
Link’d to each other (no doubt to beguile)
By Time itself, hopeless to reconcile.

In milieu corporeal, clandestine,
Chimerical, oneiric and divine,
The angels of vengeance strike to redeem
The soul’s apotheosis of the dream.

This vi’lence in the soul’s activity
Collides with the body’s passivity,
Communicating in coarse vibrations
All its reciprocal limitations,

Of temper’d blood and of melancholy,
Of humor and joy, passion and folly;
A concatenation held in suspense—
Are they the causes or the consequence?

The mind, the heart, the body and the soul—
The means to reach the limits of control—
When allies are bonded, daunting and tight,
There is no more opposition to fight

And no longer can its home be ignor’d,
Wherein, hospitably, madness is stor’d;
The hand of Reason employ’d as thy guide
To show thee where logic here is applied

To the imagination unshaken
That may or may not ever awaken.
Reality’s image often extends
Ere the beginnings and beyond the ends.

Delirium grips tight within its fist
The prospect that will forever exist,
Whence out of the furrow its threats unfurl’d:
Madness will abolish Man and the world.

[Cate]

Hi Jason - this is very skillfully crafted with an excellent rhyming scheme.
Even though I don't think I've grasped it, I enjoyed it and have been back a couple of times to re-read. It reminds me of a lovechild of William Blake and H.P. Lovecraft ... maybe a little bit of Poe.