Absolutely insane,
Completely unhinged,
Sign your commitment papers,
Bring on the straitjacket,
Thorazine, group therapy,
Long, contemplative walks
Round the asylum grounds.
To rid ourselves of suffering,
At-last-and-once-and-for-all,
Is your delusional plan.
Good God, man!
Without suffering, without
The chaos of greed and obsession,
Will you grasp the implications,
Imagine the pervasive tedium?
There’ll be no thrill of karma,
Sin, our heady entertainment.
Everywhere there’ll be
Contentment, a giddy laughter;
Stock markets will crash;
The snow leopard might survive;
Ten thousand species might thrive.
No Buddha, no Jesus,
Everywhere unemployed,
Panhandling popes, priests,
Monks, gurus, kings, cops,
All dogma a futile pursuit,
Certainly, no nirvana.
Madness, fool. Snap out of it!
David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poems appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
