My soul is lost, a brittle leaf on crevasses wide,
deeply it tumbles, cries to ice-blue depths unseen.
“Help me, blue elephant!” the plea sounds strange,
like lettuce brave, waving against this electric day,
like electrons that spin, meet, and vanish—never a goodbye,
yet slipping on lice as limbs twist, broken from the fall.

It’s all so SCHIZOPHRENIC, these tangents—an endless fall.
Stilted speech, phonemic paraphasia, words brittle, wide,
each syllable like poets’ broken pens, muttering goodbye.
They write their names on both sides, mirror-image seen
of a pencil’s shadow, as if logic and paradox make the day
where blackened eyes spare rabbits in the realm of strange.

In Japan, they chant “sei shin bun retsu byo”—this strange
mind-split state, caught in slivers of meaning, a fall
between logic and proportion, like hours slipping from day.
Where the King and Queen of ravens perch, wings wide,
angels float down to buy their slur-pees and, unseen,
glide past aisles of wonder and fiction, without a goodbye.

Yes, writing’s a socially accepted crack, a goodbye
to sensibility’s rigid lines. Words slip into the strange,
like prose sewn tight with schizophrenia’s threads unseen,
binding syllables in worlds that tilt and occasionally fall.
Here, voices of the sidewalk taunt in echoes wide,
where verbally abusive birds sing dark songs of day.

So, you leave them all behind, let the laughter of day
falter into silence, give a quiet nod and sigh goodbye.
A shelter beckons with its open arms and wide
hallways, where hidden folk spin tales in strange
and whispered dialects. One says, “Let logic fall—
in madness, the lines between sense and nonsense are unseen.”

And here in these spaces, unseen words are felt, unseen
eyes glisten at tales of crevasses climbed in the fray of day.
A paradox blooms, and we rise not from fear of fall
but a mutual, knowing smile—every poem, a brave goodbye
to sanity’s stern grip, a stepping into shadows strange,
where sidewalk birds no longer mock but sing to skies wide.

The final goodbye slips quietly, as wide gaps remain unseen,
like strange scenes passed in day, yet again we walk to fall—
we who hear and see this secret world, know nothing of goodbye.

:: 11.08.2024 ::

A sestina is a complex, structured poetic form that consists of six six-line stanzas followed by a final three-line stanza, called an envoi or tornada. Rather than relying on rhyme, a sestina is defined by the intricate pattern of word repetition at the ends of its lines.