A Lesson From Life?

It's like jazz; sometimes you play the wrong note, but you play it fortissimo, and maybe it's the right note:

Lines Written At the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (John Clare)

What I do is for me, for that I came

In a world full of worry, I am to be defamed

I am mine own sound, but mine sound is not the same

Because a hazel wood fire permeates my brain

I long for scenes where men hath never tread

As my doctor, Fenwick Skrimchire, once said

“After years of poetical prosing,” the present insanity ensued

I live among the ignorant a man hungry for food

Disheveled I wander in the quickening maze

East of me, winter, west of me, winter days

I stumble like a chariot hitched to a crippled blaze

Into the world’s own chaos half-crazed

With constructed meaning, with the simple earth’s delight

I am mine own museum vacant of mine own sight

Keith Dunlap