Let Us Have Madness Poem by Kenneth Patchen

too many listened, too many made madness openly, time to stop the rot, the wars, the slaughter; time to make time for peace and love to sow restoration and regeneration

it seems my head explodes. private sledgehammer, you haven't a bash in you. heavy and loaded with grief, good, the way angels breathe. the way it ought to be. illegible, scrawled with disbelief. in come the detectives. fit with bow-tie. they use the school, search for clues. this could be the work madmen... this could be the work of genius, this could be no work at all. Simple faucet drip to someone inside. In shirt-sleeve, pant-suit tieing his life around her finger. Slowly, the way the noose does.

Since our societies are greedy and justify ambition, since our governments see war as a simple solution to complex problems, since our morality accept human sacrifice to our secular gods in the form of massive battlefield losses, we are living in a comprehensive madness. So why continue to extol our civilization as one of reason and our behavior as rational? Let us have madness and stop deceiving ourselves. Three images conclude the poem: Hell is the suffering we have unleashed on everyone, Fog is our intellectual and moral confusion, and Graves symbolize our collective Death Wish. Poetry, in its highest manifestation, is truth-telling. Will this truth free us?

Quite good poem but I wouldn't like to be in that world!

Some lines are really nice...like...We wanted more; we looked to find An open door, an utter deed of love, ..... Thanks for sharing.

Let us be honest. A new voice, a distinct voice is very hard to find. We start to sound like each other after a while. Patchen did not. Nobody sounded like patchen. He was Whitman. He was Blake. He was John Donne.

The truth of today's generation spelt out here very candidly for how we are sacrificing love and peace for the sake of violence, very well scripted 10+++++

'We wanted more; we looked to find An open door, an utter deed of love' - that's of course, no madness! The poem's selection as the 'Modern Poem of the Day' is a well deserved honour.

We wanted more; we looked to find An open door, an utter deed of love, Transforming day's evIl darkness; .....our excess demands bring to us ultra destruction; we all shall be uprooted one day for our greed; human indomitable greed will destroy this beautiful universe; Let us have madness- I think, actually this is an ironical poem; the poet, so perfectly crafted this poem

As we grow we feel the same way, fantastic imageries and fine flow.,