Patient A

Once Again i am confined to solitude. In a Peeling white box. white is mean to be soothing but personally i think its just cheap. My brain longs to try and decipher the difference between aquamarine and baby blue, my eyes long to be blinded by a garish sunflower yellow and my heart longs for something other than blank emptiness.

I suppose you want to know why i'm here. Well if you don't im going to tell you anyway. What they'll write on my file is vandalism, anti- sociable behaviour and failure to comply - that shoul'd earn me at least another year or so in this shell of a building - what they wont tell you is that it was art, feeling, expression...

I know you may be shocked to find that people like me, " the Fruit loops" and "nut cakes" are actually made up of the same barely human parts as the rest of the general population but hey its true, god didn't make all us that different.

The nurses or angels of misery in there virginal white teflon, may deny the excistance of any emotion but its not true you just have to dig a little deeper. You see this place is like a scolding hot pan of water, bubbling and gulping, and everyone. staff and patient alike are thrown in until you are practicaly hard-boiled the difference it the harder you are and the less empathy you contain as a carer there further you will progress. As a patient its just another therapy pescription.

But hey! At least we have therapy now, when i first arrived all you got on arrival was a torturous scrubbing. Stripped and pelted with fridgid water whiched curled up your spine like a haunting serpant leaving you aneasthetised, bitter and numb. Thats if you didn't arrive her that way anyway.

One day i did have a wander i found a research facility ,whatever that is, various abandoned rooms and one which unfortunaly caught my eye. It had so many cracked pine sheves it resembled an abandoned bee hive. Each decrepit shelf was embellished with a hunderds of bullet shaped cylenders. Radiant copper - another colour my mind had forgotten - but this relisation, only made me look with deeper intensity. Each tawny vessel was infact an urn, all unclaimed. no marble headstone, no eulogy. They just sat their contained with out purpose just as they were in life.

It took a long time to get the image of those urns out my mind. maybe because the copper oxidisation make it seem like the souls within were seeping out, slowly gaining the freedom they craved, into the air. On the other hand it was most likely because sitting, relinquished in that room were my only friends in the world.

see now your really shocked not only do he have emotions, we interact. Don't worry thought we dont sit around in a circle sharing tips on how to end it all or conspire like generals to make a swift escape.

I miss my friends, someone to talk to, someone to share your wireless with and someone to help you peel potatoes. we have psycologists to talk to but they understand our conditions, they've read the books and few have wrote them but i doubt they could live with it. They couldn't live with the constant swelling of numbness, moods that change everytime the sun moves, a feeling thats somewhere between complete emptiness and over whelming fullness. They understand pills, notes and facts.

One girl i knew was callen Bonnie, she was " a right looker" thats what i heared Dr Smith say anyway. Her eyes smouldered, her lips curved like two perfect cherry blossoms perfect for picking. During the second world war there were drastic cuts. Many of us suffered. Bonnie of one of the neglected i tried to share my sparse meals with her but we were fed in our rooms and when your locked in its hopeless. Eventually she lost her animated gestures and exaggerated way of speaking. Her smouldering eyes were no longer fire rocks but glacial balls. isolated. she became in icicle cold, sharp and eventually she melted way. She had a favourite pair of shoes. lush, velveteen heels in a deep hue of plum. she told me when she first arrive how she used to go dancing in them. her cackle echoed through out the halls like the song of a tropical birl from a land far far away. She felt happy dancing. She felt secure. I stole the shoes from her room they day after she died. I couldn't save Bonnie but i would save what was special to her because she was special to me.

I dont talk about it alot anymore, things have changed since them but the scars are still here. The older i get the more i notice them. Writing is my only escape, not all can be expressed on a single piece of A4, it needs to be as big as it is when its lodged in my chest trying to burst out. My words are nothing in this world now. My presents is just a blemish occupying a room waiting to be filled again. All i have to hope for is a shiney, copper container.

If my heart could speak, im sure it would say, i wish i were someplace else today. Among these books, a great amount of knowledge there must be, but what good is knowledge when others carry the keys. Through the last ten years many improvements have been made, but the final words seem to say, my good man your still a patient here today. Intelligence, ability and knowledge surely will never last. Why, all we want to look at my good man is your past. I wish that some of these people, who write the books and make the rules, could spend a few years walking in our shoes.

Note from the writer: The poem at the end was not written by me, it is an actual patient poem which was found on basement wall af a state hospital in Augusta, Maine. The hospital still cares for those with Mental Health Issues and Needs and the Poem Have Survived Many years.