visions

for bedlam

[a/n: THIS is my favourite poem i've ever written, and i wrote it on the back of a flyer in my therapist's waiting room. it's written for bedlam mental hospital in london.]

your dementia is contagious

and your acrid intelligence cannot save me.

fractures of first-class blood spilt on

a frosted glass barred window,

the flick of a quill pen across parchement

and it's been done, another person

locked into the dark bed-pan with

walls the color of a god's soul.

lock down your mind with a touch of a pump

and the turn of a skeleton key,

shutting you down into your crisis,

your trauma that exists only in your mind.

satan, every night, they cry for help:

satan, please, take me to paradise.

because in the bedlam place where terror runs free,

there is no place you'd more want to be

than hell.