A MAD Fold-In Poem

A ▶                                                                                                          ◀ B You — this mucky fire slathered in my mind’s frame — are as committed to me as artists are to art. At times, your voice is constant — “kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself” — fists punching clay with the aim to make me nothing more than punched clay. Other times, you’re a cinema in my skull, screening me mangled: one leg auger-mauled, hand vice-crushed, eye pencil-blinded to life — “end it,” you say, in the scene you loop: this cinema’s walls with a bullet burst. At parties, you shape a sinister play from others’ glances: “hate him,” “idiot,” “fool.” When I bloom, a sun, all alight and rising, you flatten my lift into lines on a page like Jaffee’s in the back of MAD; you fold it over and now the rise is the wound from a wing cleaved and then gilded, the bloom’s a thousand-foot fall, the sun a drain. Yet with each step the unrelenting chorus of you circles round me, another chorus surfaces to surround you: the line of sheltering trees artists grow, loamy and ablaze, against your gale, the melodies of friends whose works asphyxiate your symphony, the lessons students teach about tipping your plinths, the magic of  bringing nib to page and penning life with urgency and patience, word by word, with abandon and care. Even though I know it can never silence you, I love this inky trick because it fills the blank before you can, marks up your script, swallows you choking in a page-mutating fold, so your cruel barks, garbled, almost seem to say: A ▶                                                                                                          ◀ B Click here to fold back so A meets B × frame your life with others' lines and you line your life with love