Accommodate: A Brief Account Of Friedrich Nietzsche's Final Months Poem by Warren Falcon

My illness has been my greatest boon: it unblocked me,
it gave me the courage to be myself. - Friedrich Nietzsche

When fame had found him
long gone to madness the
idea of the nation itself

- a blue-lensed delicate eye -

mimicked the mapmaker's
method of triangulation
using time not place as the
fixed point —

to see something as a whole
one must have two eyes
one of love and one of hate
the sublime and the ridiculous
accommodate

Accommodate —

his body

softening
of the brain

left to lie in darkness
a week at a time
leeches attached
to ears to draw blood
down from his head

silver nitrate, opium
and tannic acid enemas
to draw blood
furthest down

Yet he reasons that the
constant taste of blood
in his mouth turns affliction
into an advantage

has particular appeal
to the shipwrecked —

still he furies at tendencies

toward submission

toward self-enslavement

Still at work even in
madness some final
surmises
strongly felt—

Style is concern
vulnerable to distortion

Being a philosopher of perhaps
he once ended a book with 'Or? —'

Being a philosopher of endings
of final reckonings
of certain shipwreck

totally blind
he surmises
weakly upon
propped pillows

his eyebrows
his mustache
outgrowing
their ledgers

his fatal sister declaritively
writes —

'in being found

he lived well who hid well'