Forget all those stupid myths about split personalities and homicidal lunatics, these poems describe schizophrenia as it really is, and as powerfully as the illness affects everyone in close contact with a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics are some of the unhappiest people on earth, there are few hospitals to care for them and there is no respite nor protection for them from the ignorant within the community. Most people don’t and won’t even try to understand and this is what we call community care. Read on, throw wide the doorways in your mind and feel the wind whistling through and with it, unexpectedly, warm sunlight. If anyone PC objects to the word schizophrenic, I can only say that’s mild compared to some of the things that sufferers are called in usual conversation, and nobody ever objects to those terms of abuse!

Show me proof of God, said Alice.

There's none, he said, just simple Physics.

That information rubbed her mind red-raw,

crisped her fingers with adrenal current,

 

it was too terrible to think

Madness is the art of being indirect:

tense with evasion, sensing this was not the proper

 

way to be a person, Alice bristled with the horror she denied,

couldn't tell a soul it was too horrible.

 

All she could do was pluck the red, the rubric of her dress

and put up with years of being false.

 

She loved the beautiful world, but uttered no word,

horror isolated her human spirit.