If you stare out of a window
Across a bleak garden some September morning
If the neem tree in the garden reminds you of home
Vast, old, timeless
If you remember playing under a neem tree in Allahabad
And you can almost hear the laughter of children as they play
In the heat of a sultry afternoon in June
And because the window is small and barred and cannot open
Because you want to breathe freedom
Because you want to shower without them watching
Because you silently swallow your screams
Because your mind is starting to get fuzzy
Because your tongue is starting to slur
Because you have started drooling
Because your fingers shake when you write
Because the words Ritalin Prozac Depakote Lithium
Have started sounding like poetry
Because you feel your resistance slowly dying
Because you start to say the words they want to hear
Because you know the glazed look in the eyes of others
Is in your eyes too
Because this confluence of muscle and bone is wasting
Because you sleep for hours
Because you now smile at your doctors
Because you scream when the ECT paraphernalia is wheeled in
Because no one cares
Because once you’re labeled, you will be forever
Because asylums were once freak shows
Because asylum is not what it means
You go back to staring
Staring
Staring
Staring
Staring
Staring
­ Staring
Staring

Sticking me with needles again and again
Taking even more blood, need a pen?
To write down that you can't find the sickness
Well here's another symptom, Stress
I'll just leave I guess

No answers
No gain
No tests
No pain

Except the pain is so unbearable
Only another parable
Of doctors not knowing the cure
How many more weeks do I have to indure?
Of this sickness that won't go away
Maybe it will just have to stay

Oh great I'm feeling more pain
Maybe I should go to the doctors again....
I'm getting cut from a disease
How many more times until I appease?
Just get rid of the pain... Please!?

I have faith in medical science
But little in practice.
Straight spined doctors
Racing stopwatches against
Their appointment books.
Extolling the virtues of thousands of years of medical research
But unable to consider anyone's opinion other than their own.
Kindly, soft-voiced nurses shuffling from
Room to room
Doling out condolences and reassurances
Paired with regimens
Of drugs and IVs.
While Old Time in the ticking clock
Slows
To a dead crawl.
And the noise of heartbeats on machines
And discussions out in the hall
And loved ones distracting and pacifying patients in beds
Layer on top of one another to form a firm blanket of
Crushing. Boredom.
And the antiseptic smell does nothing to ease
The passing of time spent waiting
While the medical machine spins its wheels
To the chime of slot machines.
And the bustling rush outside a curtain
On hard white floors,
Does less than lend a sense a peace
But more of frantic urgency.
Minute long - task oriented visits
Where they know names, numbers, and insurance coverage
And they know how many steps it takes for them
To lend more of their valuable time
In that modern balance of cost and care.
Leaving me wondering,
Where did the connection go?
I wonder where peoples' trust went
And when it was replaced with,
"How much will this cost me?"

do you remember sitting in the ER at 3 AM and seeing an x-ray of a head and a big white blank space in it and the warm white blankets on your 11 year old legs felt cold all of a sudden.  you were given a stuffed Beanie Baby frog and you ran around the hospital courtyard nervously taking the frog to Animal World with your 8 year old sister and her rainbow colored bear. and then you sat up and helped the nurse take your mom's blood pressure and he smiled at how clear her lungs were even with the asthma and told you that you could be a doctor if you wanted to because doctors save people they fix people.  

people can't be fixed.

there are so many different levels of mastery.  I have counted all of my fingers in rhythm backwards and forwards and I think I have mastered that there are 10 and only 10.  there are only 7 notes with little half steps increments in between them in the musical alphabet but the mastery of those? next to impossible.  who knew playing a violin could make you sweat down the nape of your neck while lining the rim of your forehead with frustration.  fingers become red and warm stop trying to play so quickly so much.  however, self-loathing is not healthy so maybe we should keep playing until I am red in the face and the loathing is cured.  

will it ever be?

you should stop doing the friggin peace sign at everyone you see but you won't and that's okay I suppose. I hope it's not true that people say what they really feel when they're angry...if it is I'm lost in contempt some of the time.

I am the most oblivious of the aware I hope salt skin is accepted here.

All I need is some air
air
air
I used to walk over there
right over there
but now the hallways depress me.

I stretch and yawn
the hospice just fare
fare
fare
always cold and still,
white. Bare.*

My mother's questions
lodge crystals in
my colon.
Now we'll know
an emerald city.

The Coat
(Unsurprsingly) says
"It's my first day"
My cocktail of
tiny hard whites
and oranges,
yellows, blues;

A declaration I am not new.

In fact,
I
may never be through.
More white Coats
await corners as
mini-bosses do.    

*The controller breaking
in my palms.
I haven't lost but if I did where would I go?
The answer is, nobody knows
knows
knows.

That day has been branded when my world did stop
I experienced new meaning to that word called shock
How that womb through which I was first brought into life
has now been rendered so void, having gone under the knife

While doctors and medicine had been one form of plight
living with cancer had imposed its own fright
So when her will to live seemed to be giving up the fight
my world around me began to look very blight

What words and what feelings can overcome
that moment of emptiness standing under the sun
How naked and shallow does all reality take
when your meaning for life gives you nothing but ache

What reflections would weigh, when my tears started
other than my mother before me, my mother now departed
A soul has been released from our world below
no longer to bring me her smile with her loving hello

If I'm the Doctor,you're the nurse
This surgery couldn't get any worse
Until I find out I'm not a Doctor- or a Miracle worker.
You're so close from pulling the red right out of me
Now you made it blue
Like the artificial coloring dyes
I really can't say goodbye

After running some tests
Injecting needles in your veins
******* blood from you even if it's the only ounce left

He says you're sick
Holding a pen, he prescripts
It's for you to buy, a list of medicines

And so you have to try
You have no choice but to buy
Or else, as per Dr. Quack Quack, you'll die

As you take in
Your wallet's thinning
While the packets of medicines are still stacking

Then another symptom came
And so you have to visit the clinic again
Déjà vu you thought, Dr. Quack Quack greeted you smiling

He says you're sick again
Holding a pen, he prescripts again
It's for you to buy again, a list of medicines

Oblivious to you
He's preparing his checklist too
After traveling to Europe, next stop to Honolulu