The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
Salutary Lunatics

Not that we worship weremoons or crescent reflections
but I don't recall climbing to the ward on this floor
strange companionship of the unpersonally intimate
is it the salt air or the fiber in our bran that
produces the reliable peristalsis of perceptions
and the expanse of wall scribblings where I failed 
to give myself paper and a non-carbide pencil 
am I breathing or has my screaming become sighs
now mutterings and cascades of knuckle cracking
how I wish I were insane! freed from causality 
and the compulsion to recite my rhymes to your flag
as you triage my acuity and reflexes and ponder when 
the wires crossed in wild sparkings of synesthesia
thrown to and fro in time as memories rotate
in and out of my gravity and they pronounce me
too sensitive to thrive amid unavoidable pollutions
I have learned to nod and only whisper 
my story to brothers of the fecund mind.
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