TEXT poetry

Gabrielle Everall

I try to tell the psychiatrist
about the good madness
But he’s locked up
in Kraepelinian insanity

Can’t you feel it
I say
What Ian Curtis calls
‘the beauty’
What makes Kurt Cobain
so happy
‘cause he’s found his friends
they’re in his head

The good madness
of head butting Tony Abbott
The good madness
of not standing for
The bad madness of
Donald Trump’s
national anthem

The good madness
of watching as
a Moreton Bay Fig tree
becomes a woman’s body
and dances
like a sacred apparition

The good madness
of chaining
one’s naked female body
to a tree
to prevent the demolition
of the Bibra Lake wetlands

The good madness
of ‘the interior’
not the bad madness of ‘the
obsession with exteriors
and ego’
The good madness
of ‘breakdown as breakthrough’.

Text in quotation marks is from RD Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (Penguin, 1976: 113, 110).

Gabrielle Everall completed PhD in creative writing at The University of Western Australia.  While doing the PhD she wrote her second book of poetry, Les Belles Lettres. Her first book of poetry is called Dona Juanita and the love of boys.  She has been published in numerous anthologies including The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Performance Poets and The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan.  She has performed her poetry at the BDO, Overload, NYWF, Emerging Writer’s Festival and Putting on an Act.  She has also performed at The Bowery Poetry Club in New York and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  She currently studies at Melbourne University.