MODERN BUT ANCIENT, THIS NIGHT
Everything at night’s half-seen, massed leaves dark heaps, or intricate
poplar baskets, seen because back-lit by yellow street illumination
my head swung unlocked, a back door staring wide open
into blackness, hinged, square-edged
but incapable of being shut, so no protection
from whatever darkness was. It wasn’t comfy,
a planet-rotating-on-its-axis childhood sort of night,
more of a vector angle, dimensionless, a velocity without reference
points to tell me where the hell I was? What blackness? Somewhere?
Where? Which universe?
Psychiatrists pretended that they knew (fed up:
next patient? Same misery again) Prescribing
magic end-of-the-rainbow pills gives training years a point:
“These stop hallucinations”
(also stop brain-parts making sense of anything at all,
disorganise grammar superglue the locks inside ill heads)
Repeat “Mentally ill patients need to take their medication”
like that’s true for everybody all the time?
Simplifying moonlit half-seen massed heaps of dark inaccuracies
into “facts”
is meaningless as Vapes when we want cigarettes!
“In fact” neurology staff crossed out
the listed anti-psychotics she-must-be-given when I lay in Intensive Care
unconscious, stopping the convulsions that were killing me,
that saved my life.
Pretending brings some of us, like me, through dark dreadful
black-as-sootness to a noise of blackbirds singing wildly, greeting
the emerging sun
in a December dawn, almost 3 years free
of anti-psychotics. Ordinariness is becoming
believable at last to me, and
other people are real!