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gravity tries to break you, to wear you down.
it's so much easier to sink away into oblivion
then to constantly fight, to hold it together
and defy the winds, the rains, the weight
of your own existence, of time itself.
a floor caves in, a fire breaks out,
another day passes and you find yourself
further and further from
where you started and what you envisioned yourself as being.
what goes up must come back down again -
but the reverse isn't true at all.
what goes down often stays there.
it's hard to imagine why algonquin river state hospital
obstinately resists the inevitable, why it refuses
to acquiesce and with one heaving sigh rejoin the earth,
to let go of its quixotic quest
to remind the world of what it once was,
what it could have and should have been.
no one wants to hear anyway. no one wants
to look at this gaping wound, this real-life parable
that clearly shows in irrefutable terms
that many times the good samaritan never arrives,
that glorious ambitions are sometimes left to bleed out
and rot away, exposed to the elements, without
even the decency of a burial, let alone a memorial.
for a brief time algonquin river state hospital took flight,
bouyed by the belief in the kirkbride ideal, the hope
that society could and would care for those who had been
stricken with some of the most cruel and baffling illnesses ever known,
those diseases that contort the soul, poison the heart and mind,
and cripple even geniuses and saints.
think what you will of what came of the way these goals were approached -
this is what happens when those ideals crash back into the ground.
what goes up always comes down.
it's the simplest law of nature.
it's so much easier to sink away into oblivion
then to constantly fight, to hold it together
and defy the winds, the rains, the weight
of your own existence, of time itself.
a floor caves in, a fire breaks out,
another day passes and you find yourself
further and further from
where you started and what you envisioned yourself as being.
what goes up must come back down again -
but the reverse isn't true at all.
what goes down often stays there.
it's hard to imagine why algonquin river state hospital
obstinately resists the inevitable, why it refuses
to acquiesce and with one heaving sigh rejoin the earth,
to let go of its quixotic quest
to remind the world of what it once was,
what it could have and should have been.
no one wants to hear anyway. no one wants
to look at this gaping wound, this real-life parable
that clearly shows in irrefutable terms
that many times the good samaritan never arrives,
that glorious ambitions are sometimes left to bleed out
and rot away, exposed to the elements, without
even the decency of a burial, let alone a memorial.
for a brief time algonquin river state hospital took flight,
bouyed by the belief in the kirkbride ideal, the hope
that society could and would care for those who had been
stricken with some of the most cruel and baffling illnesses ever known,
those diseases that contort the soul, poison the heart and mind,
and cripple even geniuses and saints.
think what you will of what came of the way these goals were approached -
this is what happens when those ideals crash back into the ground.
what goes up always comes down.
it's the simplest law of nature.
| the simplest law of nature |
