The Divided Self

You are two.
Yes
Two Two
a sugar painted mask
you plaster on
to have your hands
and heart
held in familial throng.
Tis some face-
not yours.
Tis your grand facade
a square and heaven King at home-
with servants many,
a fat gold throne
cramming in the true monarch:
an other,
The seedy wreck the castle covers!
He is in seizure
in how he could wail
and crack the gaze of all the courtiers
in a seething half.
He could shock-
like the shocks that (if he was seen)
would whisk his brain
into ‘normality’.
Make him the skin-suit
the lie-King in Platinum Hall,
jewel adorned,
which leaves you sopping and forlorn
the wobbling cry which greets in dark
the shredding of the vital part
the sob of the coiled inner man-

’Nobody knows who I am!’

Inspiration for this poem came from the book ‘The Divided Self’ by R.D Laing, a controversial psychiatrist from the 1960s who pioneered an existentialist understanding of Schizophrenia.