On another Thames River,
with steady rural New England flow
toward Long Island’s warming Sound
then on and out toward whispering drowned memories
of Atlantis,
slumbering on eastern bank,
surrounded by Pequot Elder spirit grounds,
ruined medicine’s monolithic altars
worshiping insanely labyrinthine proportion,
crumbling mental-physical stately asylum carcasses,
sagging with trembling memories
of cultural inability
to remember empathic presence,
basic nature’s noticing of potentially present voices
speaking through cracked window and door frames,
peeling exterior landscapes,
collapsed roofs with rotten root foundations,
mumbly murmuring memories
of past river fogged-in days
and nights of terrorism,
ruled by despots of exegetical sanity
applauding wild bacchanal voices
jumping into tidal swollen,
then shrunken,
yet steady and wise-stately,
reasonable flow away out
toward wilder presence downstream
outstraining severed screams
of inpolitic madness.

Intended to grow up a school for sanity,
collaterally invested dust and decay emerged a prison
of abuse and neglect,
oppressively irrational exculturation.

Wild voices dismembering
loving presence of person,
too entrapped by past terrors,
chronic, climatic, psychotic prison
for muttering conversations between Ego’s Anger voice
berating left-handed fear of Fear ambivalence,
quivering recrimination reiterating through dungeon drugged nights,
layering medicated mindless attendance
over basic neural noticing,
thereby inducting rot
briefly intuiting tender absence of co-mentored narrow path
toward polypathic enculturation,
hiding in a forest
of cracked and crumbling drives and walkways,
seductive viral toxic infestation
of history weeded over.

On this other Thames
visitors violate serene gloom of despair,
turning our backs to return to safer grounds,
no less trespassing wilderness
but more profane,
slinking down an overcrowded river
of ubiquitous investment
in tumble-down sane urbanity.