Was I more psycho- than sociopath?
Hard to say. The twain do almost meet.
Cautiously, I trod the strait path
between, kept my missteps discreet.
*
Don’t ask me how I came up with first line of this epitaph, a genre which deserves more practice and of which this is first in a forthcoming series.
If you did ask me, I’d probably take the Fifth Amendment, but just for the principle of the thing, Poetry is essentially word play, a tail trying to wag the dog of reality,
Let me cast my secondary argument of defense against any spurious charge of psychosis into the jargon of contemporary literary theory. The above ditty is a Sprachspiel, an exercise manipulating dichotomies based on a disciplinary distinction that no one believes anymore, but which can still work rhetorically (psycho vs socio). Upon that semiotic field is laid a sequence of metaphors turning around liminality, twains meeting, strait path, missteps — inadvertent traipses across borders which cannot, by the rules of binary logic, be transgressed.
Either that or it was just fun to write.