After Our Shift. Sanitarium 51
No flashlights, just moonlight. Behind Dining’s dumpster.
Insomniacs and talkers, in rat grey pajamas.
Yeah, true we were breaking Rule Seven:
no fraternization. We were just shooting
the shit. Sure, Roy was rolling megamissiles
from a 1-can of crap Grade D, sans blossoms,
that his ex-wife Nadia had sent him, out of guilt
for indiscretions involving his best friend,
and brother, but the stuff was as weak as her will.
You shouldn’t medicate the patients, our Mrs. Chendra whispered,
always the passing raincloud. Ah, so true, said Jimmy L.
These bodies are our temples. He bared his left forearm,
a museum of blue-black artwork where the IVs
had blown out his veins. He coughed like a ruined old truck,
engine shot, on its way down a one lane highway
to the promised land of blotto. Then he danced flamenco,
stamping the ground with his slippers, chanting random zip codes.
He used to be a postman. Mrs. Chendra muttered, Well maybe just a puff.
You only get so many full moons. Right?
We carried Mrs. Chendra back to the old TB wing.
She sang Love Me Now Or Never. She barely weighed a thing.
* * * * *
The Troubled Sleep of Jimmy L. Sanitarium 51
3 AM. Ward 4.
Nightmare watch.
Jimmy L. again.
We say, “Easy does it, big guy.
The nights can get their hooks in.”
He says, “I sleep
like starlings in a windstorm.”
He says, “I dream
like a chisel
striking the fault of a diamond.”
He says, “I scream
a rosary of sirens.
I’ve come and gone
beyond emergencies.”
He says, “They pried
my daughter’s fist
from mine like
a dog’s jaw from meat.”
Fuck,” he says.
He says, “I am
broken.”
He says, “I am
not broken.”
He looks at us.
We say, “Not broken.”
It’s a thin grey blanket.
We cover him.
* * * * *
Mrs. Asra Leaves a Note Under the Vase. Sanitarium 51
I knew it when I saw it. Purple foxglove.
I knew the poison blossoms. The smell.
Rot and rodents. A choir of mouths
speckled with stigmata open, singing
to tone-deaf air. I gathered it as gently
as if it knew my name. Of course.
You want to know why. You’ll think
it was the pain. No, though my bones
burned. Daylight scorched my eyes.
It was not the way you, yes all of you,
turned away. Not your coldness, not
your silence. I was always meant
to be unloved. It was the ugliness.
If you’re reading this, go ahead,
stare. My frayed hem. My collar stained.
My skin scarred by the cuts I made
again and again. In this forsaken Sanitarium,
we wake up crumbling, marred,
day after day, until at last we gain
the beauty of the well-dug grave.
Look. I’ve left a bouquet.
* * * * *
The Professor Calculates Spring Using Schrondinger’s Thought Experiment.
Sanitarium 51
So if ‘cat’ is equal to all possible sequents,
then isn’t the cat both alive in an ecstasy of cream
and dead in an indifference to it,
and, if so, isn’t the clown-striped larva
that both loves and murders milkweed
a preliminary condition for exquisite transformation
and also a manic munch-fest,
and, if yes, then wouldn’t Spring,
which has been so long coming and always here,
be both a jubilant see-through robin and its ghostly light blue shell,
and, then, follow me, couldn’t joy, an exhilaration of pollen,
transmute into despair, a redundance of gravity,
but, ha, if the above is true, then isn’t the bloodroot’s blossom,
its scent like a path in moonlight, an equally possible outcome?
What a stunning sequence of poems, I keep reading and rereading them.