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The feeling that your soul is imprisoned is a universal human feeling. You may feel trapped in a body whose age, gender, appearance, or state of health is not what you want. You may feel trapped socially, economically, or politically. You may feel trapped by particular relationships. You may feel trapped by your own emotions and psychology.
What follows are more visionary poems than I’ve put in any other card because realizing that you are not alone in feeling trapped is crucial. I’ll let visionary poets conjure the universality of these feelings for you.
“In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind forged manacles I hear…”
— William Blake, Songs of Innocence
INFANT SORROW
My mother groaned! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my fathers hands;
Striving against my swaddling bands;
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.
— William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
The weeping child could not be heard;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain.
— William Blake, “A Little Boy Lost,” Songs of Innocence and Experience
For me, no one expressed the feeling of a soul imprisoned better than my friend, tormented poetic genius Jack Spencer Savage, who took his life shortly after he turned twenty-four.
John “Jack” Spencer Savage 1989-2013 photographed by Jonathan Zap
Following are some excerpts from Savage Reflections, a collection of Jack’s poems hosted on Zap Oracle. Ellipses indicate where I’ve broken off lines within a poem, and *** indicates another poem. The exceprted poems were written when Jack was nineteen to twenty-one years old. Although the excerpts I provide here emphasize the voice of the soul in torment, elsewhere, Jack’s poems express the soul’s exuberant celebration of life. Many poems ranged between the outer edges of light and dark as Jack consciously chose to express his duality to capture the paradox of human incarnation.
Amidst my catastrophe
(The one my hands crave)
Among the ruins of my loss
Inside the windowless chambers of my awful defeat
I will do this as long as I live
Until my living changes . . .
I’ll live alongside the unrelenting horror of this chaos
Knowing the fires of my pain . . .
Inside this world
Its minor annoyances, fiendish desires and fortresses of hate . . .
***
Tossing and turning and
Tossing and turning in my unsleepable bed
The stars diamond, ephemeral brilliance cascades upon the earth from those bejewelled skies in these final twilight hours
All night long, apparitions have paraded before my restless eyes in their spectral procession
Locked inside the ghostly halls of hunger,
Disturbing my slumbers
Tossing me, turning me. . .
***
I will ride each morning at seven into bleak suburban strip mall heaven, and mega mall tax offices will scratch their fingernails across the chalkboard of my mind
I will laugh naked, underground, forgotten, going nowhere
I will become dismissive with reality
I will sprawl myself out on the cold hard floors of destitution, kiss tragedy’s cold wet feet, worship and rest in the tomb of failure
I will live like a ghost
Invisible angels will sing to me
Demons and devils will feed me well
I will watch hatred rip out my eyes offering me searing blindness
I will grant malice, that malevolent magician reign over my stormy mind
I will desecrate ancient monuments to love and cower in fear before the murderous mongrel inside me
I will watch my sanity recede on the mud caked horizon line
I will learn to fault myself in astonishing ways
I will earn torture
I will grow as careless as a fiend
I will sit sick in terrible illness, paranoid and frantic muttering something to myself about peace and beauty then vomit into a plastic garbage
I will trickle through the clasp of terror, leaving my residue on its sticky lecherous fingers
I will laugh with raving blood thirsty idiots listening to bad music then go home solemn faced and listen to good music
I will masturbate prolifically and carry with shame the anvil of my waste
I will let my brain go unshaved so long foul noxious fumes will begin to seep from my eyes
I will gulp kerosene in defense of their eyes and exhale a graveyard, wondering how long I will live
I will suck from the black spires of death
I will dance and disappear into a carnival of poison and come back slowly, coughing and depressed, with all of my internal organs bruised
My movements will be distracted
I will become estranged from my body, exiled from reason
I will cut hope’s throat and bathe in her blood
I will retain false hopes of waking up from this appalling nightmare
I will pray- sadly- in the forlorn cathedral of misfortune
I will curse at beauty because I am an imbecile
And I will bitterly curse the pavements beneath my feet also because I am an imbecile
I will stand distraught in a house of mirrors tearing out all my hair . . .
***
But to return once again
To my life of old,
My life of days past.
Sweet, cherished innocence.
That sanctuary, that courtyard
Free from the malevolent black butterflies,
Escaping from diseased mouths
Contaminated intent.
My mind lulled like a sailboat
Upon the glass of a breathless mountain lake.
I slept at ease, and the purity of all my emotions was unmatched.
But parasites do not discriminate.
And they tunneled into my brain
As they would any orphaned sailor or deranged addict,
Crowding and festering its illuminated passageways,
They only know one taste
***
The torrid whipping of winter’s wrath
Lashes me into subterranean chambers of frenzy, dizzying the virulent thoughts trapped in my skull
So the hunchback staggers down polluted alleyways
Throughout this abandoned city
I carry insects in ampoules
Waiting for a moment like this
Silent, alone, terrified, and outnumbered –
The Augustan columns of this monument
On the verge of total collapse—
Eager to swallow them
To feel their insect legs
Scuttle down my throat, intoxicate my veins
To anoint me in the oil of their dark, dazzling ceremony,
To bathe me in their song of despair.
Energy evaporates, internal warfare.
The songs of war set the skies aflame
Endless armies arise from my flesh
Nourished by my dark, anguished blood
Opposing armies maraud
Pillaging the temples of my strength
I wait in silent impoverished anguish,
For my silent bus to transport me into the depths of the unfolding night.
The fists of night have me drunk.
***
That toll call beckons me awake,
My vessel has abandoned me,
And I watch the train pull away beyond the corpse-like crimson horizon
Steaming into the night.
Left alone, to wander these bent streets of night
Tumbling into depthless black chasms
Surrounded
Violent, scarred eyes steeping in the molten shadows
Tongues twisted in violent malcontent, contorted by the strength of their own bitter venom
Ears lopsided, malnourished
Eyes acquired after lifetimes immersed in this dark carnival
And the bleak drunken city murmurs in bloodless conspiracy
All my wine bottles are filled with ash
My blood is impure, breeding with a dark murky substance
All my nourishment is breathing with maggots
My lungs are stifled
Centipedes seep from my ceiling in a flood
The steel wind screeches like a starving wraith
As the insects enter my body
The night merges into me
With all my power I revolt
I scream, as though being buried alive
As though there is help
But there is no help,
No savior . . .
********
The greatest empathy usually comes from those who have greatly suffered.
“No tree it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” — Carl Jung
Jack’s suffering could cause him to lash out at others at times, but also to have great empathy, as this poem reflects:
Come To Me
“I am weak,” you say
“I cannot stand on my two feet,” you tell me,
“There is something thrashing about violently inside of me, devouring my flesh and blood.”
Come to me.
Bind your loneliness to my own.
Offer to me your sorrows, and I will turn them into joys and riches.
Give to me your sins, I will take them.
Forget all that you have done wrong and we will dine together tonight.
There is a fine banquet hall, with a place at the table for you.
You in your solitude, you who are suffering
Don’t feel so bad.
I am here with you.
You are guided by my love.
I see you in the aimless crowds filled with sadness
I see you on those miserable anonymous streets
Scavenging for the remnants of the glory you once knew,
Finding your way.
I tell you again
Come to me, I am with you already.
For more on Jack and his poems see:
Savage Reflections — the Soulful Poetry of Jack Spencer Savage
Some Thoughts on the Poems of John “Jack” Spencer Savage
John “Jack” Spencer Savage in Memorium
***********
Sometimes, the soul is imprisoned by the oppressive outer circumstances that often come with human incarnation.
Other times, the soul feels imprisoned by inner circumstances, and those too often come with human incarnation.
Both types of suffering are equally real and universal. Someone could look at the photos of Jack and think, “What does this kid have to suffer about? He’s young, intelligent, physically healthy, and good-looking. He grew up in a middle-class home, no war zone, no extreme poverty, etc. ” But this would be a woefully ignorant impression because we don’t know what inner demons and personal hells may lie beneath an enviable exterior or seemingly privileged life. You don’t understand human nature if you think the suffering of those with blessings is less real than those with more visible afflictions and objective hardships.
If you’ve been especially mistreated, you need to have the compassion for yourself and others that the world did not have for you.
Many forces beyond individual control can imprison the soul — war, political oppression, economic forces, oppression based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or even the alienation of being significantly different apart from active oppression. The feeling of imprisonment could be due to an ailing body causing a soul to feel trapped by corporeal limitations.
Only the very sheltered and naive believe that everyone is creating their own reality. Not every form of oppression can be reduced to negative thinking or neurotic complex. Did every single man, woman, child, and animal in 7th Century Pompei create the reality of an erupting volcano?
On the other hand, we do sometimes create our own realities and act as the prison warden of our soul. We give our power over to another, looking for wholeness outside of ourselves. We choose to reach for bottle, pill, or powder before those things take away our will. We may choose to adopt addictive ideologies and get polarized by paranoia-inducing rabbit holes.
We may imprison our souls by disowning our essence and betraying our True Will. As Blake says, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” The desires he means are the desires of our soul, not those of our reptile brain.
Have compassion for yourself and others who are imprisoned by external forces of oppression. If you are the warden of your own soul’s imprisonment, consider this an auspicious time to throw off the shackles of self-imposed bondage and liberate yourself into life.
The feeling that your soul is imprisoned is a universal human feeling. You may feel trapped in a body whose age, gender, appearance, or state of health is not what you want. You may feel trapped socially, economically, or politically. You may feel trapped by particular relationships. You may feel trapped by your own emotions and psychology.
What follows are more visionary poems than I’ve put in any other card because realizing that you are not alone in feeling trapped is crucial. I’ll let visionary poets conjure the universality of these feelings for you.
“In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind forged manacles I hear…”
— William Blake, Songs of Innocence
INFANT SORROW
My mother groaned! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my fathers hands;
Striving against my swaddling bands;
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.
— William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
The weeping child could not be heard;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain.
— William Blake, “A Little Boy Lost,” Songs of Innocence and Experience
For me, no one expressed the feeling of a soul imprisoned better than my friend, tormented poetic genius Jack Spencer Savage, who took his life shortly after he turned twenty-four.
John “Jack” Spencer Savage 1989-2013 photographed by Jonathan Zap
Following are some excerpts from Savage Reflections, a collection of Jack’s poems hosted on Zap Oracle. Ellipses indicate where I’ve broken off lines within a poem, and *** indicates another poem. The exceprted poems were written when Jack was nineteen to twenty-one years old. Although the excerpts I provide here emphasize the voice of the soul in torment, elsewhere, Jack’s poems express the soul’s exuberant celebration of life. Many poems ranged between the outer edges of light and dark as Jack consciously chose to express his duality to capture the paradox of human incarnation.
Amidst my catastrophe
(The one my hands crave)
Among the ruins of my loss
Inside the windowless chambers of my awful defeat
I will do this as long as I live
Until my living changes . . .
I’ll live alongside the unrelenting horror of this chaos
Knowing the fires of my pain . . .
Inside this world
Its minor annoyances, fiendish desires and fortresses of hate . . .
***
Tossing and turning and
Tossing and turning in my unsleepable bed
The stars diamond, ephemeral brilliance cascades upon the earth from those bejewelled skies in these final twilight hours
All night long, apparitions have paraded before my restless eyes in their spectral procession
Locked inside the ghostly halls of hunger,
Disturbing my slumbers
Tossing me, turning me. . .
***
I will ride each morning at seven into bleak suburban strip mall heaven, and mega mall tax offices will scratch their fingernails across the chalkboard of my mind
I will laugh naked, underground, forgotten, going nowhere
I will become dismissive with reality
I will sprawl myself out on the cold hard floors of destitution, kiss tragedy’s cold wet feet, worship and rest in the tomb of failure
I will live like a ghost
Invisible angels will sing to me
Demons and devils will feed me well
I will watch hatred rip out my eyes offering me searing blindness
I will grant malice, that malevolent magician reign over my stormy mind
I will desecrate ancient monuments to love and cower in fear before the murderous mongrel inside me
I will watch my sanity recede on the mud caked horizon line
I will learn to fault myself in astonishing ways
I will earn torture
I will grow as careless as a fiend
I will sit sick in terrible illness, paranoid and frantic muttering something to myself about peace and beauty then vomit into a plastic garbage
I will trickle through the clasp of terror, leaving my residue on its sticky lecherous fingers
I will laugh with raving blood thirsty idiots listening to bad music then go home solemn faced and listen to good music
I will masturbate prolifically and carry with shame the anvil of my waste
I will let my brain go unshaved so long foul noxious fumes will begin to seep from my eyes
I will gulp kerosene in defense of their eyes and exhale a graveyard, wondering how long I will live
I will suck from the black spires of death
I will dance and disappear into a carnival of poison and come back slowly, coughing and depressed, with all of my internal organs bruised
My movements will be distracted
I will become estranged from my body, exiled from reason
I will cut hope’s throat and bathe in her blood
I will retain false hopes of waking up from this appalling nightmare
I will pray- sadly- in the forlorn cathedral of misfortune
I will curse at beauty because I am an imbecile
And I will bitterly curse the pavements beneath my feet also because I am an imbecile
I will stand distraught in a house of mirrors tearing out all my hair . . .
***
But to return once again
To my life of old,
My life of days past.
Sweet, cherished innocence.
That sanctuary, that courtyard
Free from the malevolent black butterflies,
Escaping from diseased mouths
Contaminated intent.
My mind lulled like a sailboat
Upon the glass of a breathless mountain lake.
I slept at ease, and the purity of all my emotions was unmatched.
But parasites do not discriminate.
And they tunneled into my brain
As they would any orphaned sailor or deranged addict,
Crowding and festering its illuminated passageways,
They only know one taste
***
The torrid whipping of winter’s wrath
Lashes me into subterranean chambers of frenzy, dizzying the virulent thoughts trapped in my skull
So the hunchback staggers down polluted alleyways
Throughout this abandoned city
I carry insects in ampoules
Waiting for a moment like this
Silent, alone, terrified, and outnumbered –
The Augustan columns of this monument
On the verge of total collapse—
Eager to swallow them
To feel their insect legs
Scuttle down my throat, intoxicate my veins
To anoint me in the oil of their dark, dazzling ceremony,
To bathe me in their song of despair.
Energy evaporates, internal warfare.
The songs of war set the skies aflame
Endless armies arise from my flesh
Nourished by my dark, anguished blood
Opposing armies maraud
Pillaging the temples of my strength
I wait in silent impoverished anguish,
For my silent bus to transport me into the depths of the unfolding night.
The fists of night have me drunk.
***
That toll call beckons me awake,
My vessel has abandoned me,
And I watch the train pull away beyond the corpse-like crimson horizon
Steaming into the night.
Left alone, to wander these bent streets of night
Tumbling into depthless black chasms
Surrounded
Violent, scarred eyes steeping in the molten shadows
Tongues twisted in violent malcontent, contorted by the strength of their own bitter venom
Ears lopsided, malnourished
Eyes acquired after lifetimes immersed in this dark carnival
And the bleak drunken city murmurs in bloodless conspiracy
All my wine bottles are filled with ash
My blood is impure, breeding with a dark murky substance
All my nourishment is breathing with maggots
My lungs are stifled
Centipedes seep from my ceiling in a flood
The steel wind screeches like a starving wraith
As the insects enter my body
The night merges into me
With all my power I revolt
I scream, as though being buried alive
As though there is help
But there is no help,
No savior . . .
********
The greatest empathy usually comes from those who have greatly suffered.
“No tree it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” — Carl Jung
Jack’s suffering could cause him to lash out at others at times, but also to have great empathy, as this poem reflects:
Come To Me
“I am weak,” you say
“I cannot stand on my two feet,” you tell me,
“There is something thrashing about violently inside of me, devouring my flesh and blood.”
Come to me.
Bind your loneliness to my own.
Offer to me your sorrows, and I will turn them into joys and riches.
Give to me your sins, I will take them.
Forget all that you have done wrong and we will dine together tonight.
There is a fine banquet hall, with a place at the table for you.
You in your solitude, you who are suffering
Don’t feel so bad.
I am here with you.
You are guided by my love.
I see you in the aimless crowds filled with sadness
I see you on those miserable anonymous streets
Scavenging for the remnants of the glory you once knew,
Finding your way.
I tell you again
Come to me, I am with you already.
For more on Jack and his poems see:
Savage Reflections — the Soulful Poetry of Jack Spencer Savage
Some Thoughts on the Poems of John “Jack” Spencer Savage
John “Jack” Spencer Savage in Memorium
***********
Sometimes, the soul is imprisoned by the oppressive outer circumstances that often come with human incarnation.
Other times, the soul feels imprisoned by inner circumstances, and those too often come with human incarnation.
Both types of suffering are equally real and universal. Someone could look at the photos of Jack and think, “What does this kid have to suffer about? He’s young, intelligent, physically healthy, and good-looking. He grew up in a middle-class home, no war zone, no extreme poverty, etc. ” But this would be a woefully ignorant impression because we don’t know what inner demons and personal hells may lie beneath an enviable exterior or seemingly privileged life. You don’t understand human nature if you think the suffering of those with blessings is less real than those with more visible afflictions and objective hardships.
If you’ve been especially mistreated, you need to have the compassion for yourself and others that the world did not have for you.
Many forces beyond individual control can imprison the soul — war, political oppression, economic forces, oppression based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or even the alienation of being significantly different apart from active oppression. The feeling of imprisonment could be due to an ailing body causing a soul to feel trapped by corporeal limitations.
Only the very sheltered and naive believe that everyone is creating their own reality. Not every form of oppression can be reduced to negative thinking or neurotic complex. Did every single man, woman, child, and animal in 7th Century Pompei create the reality of an erupting volcano?
On the other hand, we do sometimes create our own realities and act as the prison warden of our soul. We give our power over to another, looking for wholeness outside of ourselves. We choose to reach for bottle, pill, or powder before those things take away our will. We may choose to adopt addictive ideologies and get polarized by paranoia-inducing rabbit holes.
We may imprison our souls by disowning our essence and betraying our True Will. As Blake says, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” The desires he means are the desires of our soul, not those of our reptile brain.
Have compassion for yourself and others who are imprisoned by external forces of oppression. If you are the warden of your own soul’s imprisonment, consider this an auspicious time to throw off the shackles of self-imposed bondage and liberate yourself into life.
