I Picked the Sound and the Fury

I hadn’t quite realized
where I was.
Until a boy told me
he could hear people’s thoughts.

“I really can,” he said,
“I just have no way to prove it.”
I nodded my head
and continued watching tv.

I walked through
the hall. Even though
I could see both ends
went on forever.

There was an old woman
I played cards with.
She insisted that she shuffle
but I would deal.  And she mumbled
more to herself, than she talked to me.

I scanned the bookshelf
for anything that would kill
two days.  And it was quite the discovery
to find, they let people with depression
read Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

After a dinner,
of crappy turkey and mashed potatoes.
The small night nurse, with his white pony tail
and even whiter beard, gave me my bed sheets.
Then he went on to the same questions,
that the doctors had been asking all day.

I stared out the window through bars
and a grate,
I guess to stop me from falling through
in case I made it through the bars.

And the moon looked brighter,
much more than it ever had.
I could make out every car left
in the lot.  All the trees and their leaves.

I crawled into the bed,
that was a weird
kind of itchy warm.
And couldn’t quite make out
who I should be demanding answers from,
To figure out
why the real world
left me so far behind.

  So yeah, I lost my shit and ended up spending a couple days in a mental hospital.  Its a good sign to how far you’ve fallen when they cut the cord from your gym shorts so you can’t strangle yourself with it.  At the time it happened there was this overwhelming sense of dread that I was going to be there for unforeseeable amount of time.  It’s a testament to my mother and uncle’s sheer determination that I wasn’t.

  The poem itself is very straight forward.   When I wrote this it had been just long enough that I still could recall how it felt but could look at it objectively. There’s really not much more to it than what’s here.