Degradation of King Lear’s Mind

At first

the king

merely disliked

contradiction

 

A manageable

illness

 

He dismissed

three ministers

 

Replacing them

with his

reflection

 

Because

the reflection

never disagreed

or interrupted

 

Soon

maps became

insolent

 

Borders moved

when he slept

 

River

refused to

consult him

before they

chose the sea

 

He ordered

the cartographers

to correct them

 

By winter

the king

had begun

suspecting gravity

 

Everything

fell downward

 

An obvious

conspiracy against

his ascension

 

He commanded

the architects

to build balconies

higher

 

From there

he addressed

the kingdom

 

His sentences

wandered away

before reaching

their verbs

 

Still

the scribes

recorded every

fragment

 

Then

spent nights

constructing

wisdom

from the debris

 

Eventually

the king

discovered

weather

 

Rain

was criticism

 

Thunder

an attempted

coup

 

Lightning was

the signature

of an assassin

too cowardly

to approach

 

He

declared war

on the sky

 

Cannons

fired into

the clouds

 

The people

cheered

 

They had

learned

that survival

sometimes

requires

enthusiasm

 

By spring

the king

no longer slept

 

Dreams

had become

foreign agents

 

He wandered

the palace

questioning

portraits

 

Demanding

to know

if they

served him

 

One morning

he summoned

the sun

 

It failed

to appear

before him

 

So he

sentenced it

to darkness

 

No one

laughed

 

That

frightened him

more than laughter

 

Because

somewhere

inside

what remained

of his mind

 

The king

understood

 

A kingdom

that obeys

your madness

 

Has removed

the final witness

 

Who

might have

proved

 

You

were

mad