Fragmented Resonances Reflections

This poem represents the deconstruction of external attempts to describe a fragmented human with labels of dysfunction and to reclaim the value of lived experience knowing through self-determined narrative reconstruction.

The poem fell out in five-line iambic pentameter, and we* had no idea why until we mapped it out as if each line was allocated to a line on a “stave” of music. The form itself does not indicate pitch although a lower position on the score could be interpreted as lower in register than a higher position.

Tracing our own lived experience of the labelling of the gifts our once wide-eyed dreaming artist possessed as evidence of madness, the poem leads us into the realms of a discontinued round of ECT treatment and resulting dissociative fugue a decade ago. Left with only two strands of self to tether us to the external world through music expressed in song and word-salad, this communicative chaos is reflected in the progressive punctuation of word placement across the stave.

Where the piece moves from standard font to italicized font at “dissolve” which also slips across two lines on the stave, this denotes what we personally understand to be the bleed between “reality” a distinctly discernible to outside observers from “madness”. As the words hover between normative engagement and madness, a completely dramatic shift in font and theatricality of word-choice strikes and “Pathos plays The Whimsy” is headlined. The piece finds its resolution in the madness we continue challenge ourselves to cherish, celebrate and embrace.

To Mad Poets that have challenge assertions that we “suck at poetry”, remind us of the space between the words and the music in the madness. And to the memory of the late great Ben Frater. Our eternal gratitude to you all.

*Fi Peel curates their complex humanity as represented by distinct alters. The piece refers to their reality throughout with the use of first-person plurality where first-person singularity is the normative expression of self for many.