Normally, I am not one to provide background on a poem.  I like them to stand on their own and I love the mystery of not knowing exactly what a reader will grab from the poem.  I have learned many times that often with modern art, the art is more reliant on the audience than on the artist in a manner of speaking.  Sometimes, although it feels very scary and out of control, the best reaction is to hear someone tell you what the piece said to them and you have no clue that you said anything remotely similar to what they received.  Some will attribute the meaning they have received to God.  I don’t know but I do like the mystery of it.

I decided to introduce this for two reasons.  One is that it is perhaps yet another downer poem, but I want to provide information on the source, and two is the ability to give some credit to some musicians.  On the first, since I have been on new medicines under my treatment with B2, I have gained a new disturbing side effect of daily depression cycles.  I have been accustomed to ones that last only a few days but having ones within a day is strange, powerful and discouraging.  We have tinkered with medicines and they are better than they have been.  For a while, I could count on a huge crash into severe despair between two and four in the afternoon.  This would occur at work or at home.  At home, I could go to bed and sleep through it, but at work, I force myself to live through the agony.  I try to live through it and I work hard to be my most normal.  These crashes have been intense in the last few days and that is the place from which this poem comes.

On the second, I have loved the music group The Prodigy since the 90’s.  They are a high energy club band, dance band, and most sane people think that they sound like wackos, and on the other hand, the music snobs, a group I belong in on occasion, believe that this is simple music, music for idiots.  There is another group, a small group of people, who love this group’s music because of how it touches this radical part of our emotional complex.  I don’t understand why, for there is no science to this, but I love it.  As a matter of fact, this afternoon, I used some music from The Prodigy to work on pulling out of a crash and it was partially effective.  This poem points to a song called, “Take Me To The Hospital.”  (Please be sure to sample the video at the end to get a sense for the energy and madness.)  I hear this song and it stirs up those feelings of knowing that there is nothing left and you need to quit and let someone lock you up.  The title of the poem is part of a line from the song, “Welcome to the scene of the crash,” which feels perfectly apropos as I describe the scene of one of my afternoon crashes.  Now I have blabbed on and on and maybe that is why I don’t like to give background.  Pardon the interruption and here we go:

Scene of the Crash

I want life.

My mind zigs

In death’s egg noodle.

Take it away.

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