three years I worshipped
in the red brick cathedrals
by the ugliest lake on the planet,
but I was cast out of the holy halls,
with mounds of Mellaril, and other sacred potions in pill form
to see the “outreach caseworker”, though I never knew
what she was reaching for
my husband had divorced me,
both my sons were in Dallas, dealing cards
at Wall Street casinos, holding the aces for themselves or a chosen few,
like I really knew anything about what
filled their days
my sister took me in,
fed me finger foods, had her maid bathe me
and invited the ghosts from my past into her house
they all hugged me and told me how nice my hair looked
now that I was no longer yanking it out by the fist full
and choking on it as it went down
they smelled of sycophantic scents from Macy’s
and Neiman Marcus, and I longed for the odor of my cellmate,
who had to be submerged in a steaming sea once a week, after
they had pumped enough of Morpheus’ brew in her to
mellow a mammoth
I missed her, and her truculent silence
and the way her arms writhed in her jacket,
like so many snakes squirming to be free,
or perhaps those were the last sin eating serpents
in their death throes, but I would never know
for in 1000 days and 1000 nights, her jacket
was never removed, for the white ones feared what
black storm waited inside, so they allowed it to hide
someplace in her fetid carcass
now when I look across the charcoal stillness
of my room, cluttered with dead distractions,
I imagine her there, on her cot, producing anthems
on mad marching afternoons, or singing lullabies
in evenings last gasps, all without making a sound,
then my eyes well with tears, for I know
she would miss me too, and worry
what I was doomed to hear and smell
now that her mystic music and stench
were stolen from me
part one was "fragrant ladies rocking slowly", diary of a woman in an asylum in the late 1960s--part two is her discharge into the warped world--in the 1970s the author worked in a psychiatric hospital by an ugly lake