2 Excerpt From Mind Emerging
A Click of the Door
I enter the ward
with a click of the door.
After peeing in a cup
I wait in a small room—
a desk and two chairs.
They ask me to empty my pockets.
They take my pens.
I cry losing my ability to talk.
My poetry begs for ink.
This is my home for the next month,
my freedom gone. I will not
be allowed to walk in the daylight.
Meals will be on staff time.
I pause at the counter shaped like a horseshoe.
I know the routine. The psych tech
pulls at my stuff searching for contraband,
looking for drugs and things I can harm myself with.
He thinks my face cream is in a glass jar.
Glass is not allowed on the unit.
I grab the jar from him and throw it,
hitting the wall like a stone
“Plastic doesn’t shatter,” I tell him
I know this hospital,
know it like I know my own
demons. So many doors line the hall
all the same color.
I lose track of which is mine
and walk into the room of a naked man.
He is completely shaved, his dick
the length of half a hotdog.
He screams. I leave.
The bedrooms contain two twin beds
with starched white sheets and plastic pillows.
I drool at night, in circles on the pillowcase,
a side effect of the medication. I almost drown
in my own spit. The fake glass window
allows sunshine to brighten the room.
I’m not warmed by it.
The ward runs cold, maybe to keep us
awake and moving.
The dayroom is sterile and smells of Febreze.
There are couches filled with Styrofoam,
a white board and round tables. The TV is paused
on Forrest Gump running, his beard ragged.
The room is well lit, no dark corners
in which to hide. I don’t eat in the dayroom.
My fellow patients don’t interest me,
conversation is for the outside world.
I write poems on the white board
in red marker. They are freedom,
a source of heat. My fellow patients scowl
at my words because they don’t understand.
I write “we,” the patients and I,
“are stuck in mud. We don’t glow
with sun, our legs are fucked—
we can’t run.” In a couple of days,
staff will erase my words,
encouraging me to write again—
“Today we ran! We said be well.”
A few of us pace the floor
up and down. Then tired, I stand
as still as a hinge on a closed door.
When will I fall into myself?
Normality is suspended.
I know the unbroken gaze
of psychosis. No one sees the people
I dialogue with. Medication and time
bring me back to palm trees
and swimming pools, conversation
and grilled chicken. I like washing the dishes
and returning to a bed dressed in flowered sheets,
sleeping in dreams of eating chocolate,
reading mail sent to my home.