April 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 2

Psychosis is a devil on two sticks.

It is the cursed marriage of limitation and infinity,

the paradoxical melding of fantasy and reality.

Shamans, it’s said we schizophrenics were –

magic men who wielded immense power

both true and false.

Distorted reality through consensus.

Magic was never here nor there.

People believed in magic,

so real magic became.

They abided shamans’ visions revealed in fire,

so status and power shamans attained.

Great strength built on an illusory foundation.

Jeanne d’Arc was a bold pupa

whose chrysalis fell black before

she could emerge a mighty monarch.

Her visions, the young warrior perceived

as divine commune with Archangel Michael.

Hallucinations and delusions, perhaps,

yet through her episodes she caught glimpses

of a light, a future beyond the cave

kindred to the shamans’ visions.

Fervent belief granted her fiery strength,

strength to drive the English from Orléans.

In the masses, she lit sparks of inspiration.

The winds of change carried her

to the stake upon which she immolated.

Where the French acknowledged a godsent hero,

a narrative that suited Charles VII -

the English judged a devil-possessed peasant.

Reality through distorted consensus.

Her body still shackled within the cave,

Jeanne d’Arc was reduced to kindling.

The shamans, too, were bound to the cave.

Their magic crumbled in the faces

of men bearing crosses and rifles,

themselves mystics of science and faith.

With science came rational methods

grandiose men arrogant and irrational devised,

but madness reformed under a corset

remains madness at its heart.

Bodies confined to overcrowded asylums,

we psychiatric patients endured

treatments by names like transorbital lobotomy,

acronyms such as ECT and IST.

New institutional hierarchies were born,

yet asylums were equalizers just as well.

A 20th century Jeanne d’Arc and Charles the Mad

could finally live in shared squalor and fear.

Still, researchers achieved medical advancements.

Some lost minds were restored,

though often at the body’s expense.

Many of us survived, if only

to wind up in jails or alone on the streets.

At present, we find ourselves lost

amid this disorienting Digital Age,

an artificial era diseased with self-destructive nihilism.

Machines warp minds and manufacture consensus.

Desperate, wayward souls search for gods

hidden in circuitry and large language models.

Capital has purchased science and usurped religion.

Ruling elites neither envision nor desire

a world that survives beyond their end,

suicidal death cultists likening

themselves to a deranged penguin

who would have us blindly follow on

a futile march to the Antarctic mountains.

Yet a black chrysalis does not promise

the pupa contained has perished in metamorphosis.

From darkness, a butterfly may struggle free.

In psychosis, I have suffered:

Unreality. Isolation. Poverty.

To the precipice of rebirth,

my suffering has brought me.

Greater empathy and insight,

internal fortitude akin to galvanized steel –

these, I would never have otherwise known.

True freedom, however, we can reach only

through shared humanity and collective action.

No god, hero, machine, or magic will save us.

Enlightened by suffering,

our weakness transforms into our strength.

Believing in our own power,

we can break from the vacuous cave

to build a healthier, happier, kinder world.