- It’s Friday and they don’t send
flowers anymore. There is no opening in this door: just a punched
hole of perspex, warm and smoky against my cheek. I see...
-
- A void of chequered floor, an
empty corridor, no-one allowed to visit anymore.
-
- No more tripping of days in a
blind haze of city streets, high on the secretions of forbidden
adrenal glands. No more soft-centred clapping of hands. No more
passes for the day. And all for my own good, they say.
-
- Would that I were past caring:
past wanting to share in the mad rambling circus of life... would
that I could resign to a life confined: would that I could endure,
but their pharmacology cannot affect a cure.
-
- Yesterday, I ran helter-skelter,
naked as a baby, all the way down the high street: handing out
fistfuls of fivers to any woman I saw with sad brown eyes: any
woman who looked like you.
-
- I am burning my wings, my
beautiful angel wings. The flames are carmine, scarlet, vermilion
and crimson: hot as painted canvas; raw and violent as
unreciprocated dreams.
-
- There are shadows within the
shadows. The ward is filled with shadows; and I am kept awake
thru’ the pre-dawn hours. The lithium, they say, is ineffectual. I
am unresolved: their science, a library of undifferentiated
symbols.
-
- I cannot sleep. The blood rubs
rough against the thin walls of my arteries: a skein of chemicals,
devoid of volition, simmering in a gurgle of de-oxygenated
agitation.
-
- I smoke too many cigarettes. The
nicotine clogs up, but does not dissolve, the acid salts beneath
this skin. I am too thin: these protruding bones, a too prominent
intimation of my mortality.
-
- Autumn winds blow rusted leaves
past the ward windows. Pensioner women wear poppies and think
about dead lovers. And every time I close my eyes I see your face.
-
- There is too much time for
remembrance: not enough television to confuse the senses. I hear a
sad trumpet. The queen lays down a wreathe in the blue flickering
light. Summer is a closed door. It’s Friday... and they don’t send
flowers anymore.