Note: The poem featured here will be changed on the first day of every month. At this point, the old poem will get archived in the Poems category.

SYD BARRETT

He sometimes sighted things
that weren’t really there, as poets
tend to do; he heard
the snowflakes giggle
as they fell.

So they placed him in a home
for broken souls, and though
everyone was kind, the holes
kept getting bigger
in his mind.

I tattooed my brain, he said,
and the threads became
a tangled knot, and the hedges
of the labyrinth grew high:
And the world moved on and forgot.

The band that was once his band
trudged on to stardom, while
his genius lay crumbling
in a cell, on a freefall into a cleft
of his own making.

The black and green scarecrow,
he wrote, is sadder than me; so I hope
he’s shaken off the cloying soil
and is floating somewhere in space,
his spirit free.