Mental (St) Illness Poem by Keith Rushing

renegade memories
relentless effrontery
rogue fractured intruders
a formulable formidable aside inside
man is a modified monkey
a jackdaw in peacock's feathers
contradictions, the multiplicity that is a unity
a patchwork of odds and ends
snips and snails
dreams and delusions
hopes and fears
a mystifying knot of phantasmagoric disquietude

agape in a stupefied bewilderment
as an autistic child swept up in minutiae
inscrutable incongruities
melange of matters beyond explanations
maundering machinates
necessary inventions repeating and reforming
sheltering some aspect of the mind's deforming
'reaction formations' sotto voce instructs the analyst
defending emotions at the personalities bequest
merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream
psychotherapy is no mere scheme