The Spright Who Lives Between The Wall and the Door: A Poem, Based on Readings of Timothy Leary’s biography by Robert Greenfield

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend”

 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

My Father,

well he wasn’t quite the Man, was he?

It was my Grandfather I took after the most

with his theater antics, the way he’d spontaneously lurch into a King Leary Speech

Mother did her best, but Daddy was a drunk

and when the inheritance came in, the family promised punched straight off the line,

Clockwork, hailing a cab, he handed me 100 bucks straight away, while Mom got naught a how do you do, but

after that the Figurehead, playing The Man

Well he was Nowhere to Be Seen

But the Well Connected links, what came from

Tying my Mother to try so hard to make of me

–what do you make of… Tiny Tim Leary?

She put me in the best of schools, I snuck out and fucked around,

got some good religious girls sent home in disgrace, but at one point, can you believe…

this Acid-tongued dope dealer, was a honored student at Westpoint Military Academy?

and at Westpoint, the old gray military line, that ‘old gray line’ they called tradition handing down conformity,

That hallowed Institution had this thing they called ‘The Silencing’

After I broke honor code, by lying to the upperclass

about getting Drunk on a train late-stumbling-in

though the court, tribunal cleared me fine- the code had more to say

Unexpelled, still present, like a bone lodged in a throat –

My fellow students shunned such a punk,

and would not say a word to me

It broke me down, and mad made me, a man, all alone

except for books, and collar-up walks in the sharp brisk wind

on the old gray line of cadets down the bloody senseless river of all-military history

I wrote my mother, who wanted to encourage me to keep following (honey, just keep along, following!)

what fantastical destiny she had in her flower-engined mind for futured-me

ah earnest, loving as she could be…

My father hurt her, man he was

So she wanted him not reared… from me…

Just so, like I, delivering ostentatious dramatic works, in the halls of some testimonial hauled before some drug war Senate subcommittee,

One loves- what things one loves, oneself

we understand each other well,

come what may, oh Godly mother, wrote I, if I forgive the bastard his chase

The Man who loves to run away – your Leary son, not the self-same as son of Man, just nearby the field of glee

An epitaph as the abandoning father, handing a crisp benjamin to a self-inventive boy

one spirit takes a care away, one cares a taken spirit’s way-

take down this to the letter the spirit yet I’ll won-day, see, yet.. Mother should have ‘damn the Man!’ -‘d, post this with haste:

“THE SILENCING IS THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME”