The Ward
Madness being the point of contact between the oneiric and the erroneous
Michel Foucault
Presuming to be the scribe while you live the agony
Margo Button
Child of the green air, of the lust for syringes in the sky above
Verdun’s caustic alleyways. Child who donned a cape to fly through
glass. Child inside the child inside the trunk when it was dark and the
airholes were as tiny as whispers. Child of the time. Child of the palms
spilling with gin. Child whose flowers grew like burns. Child of the
trip between school and the moon. Of the scars on the shin, child, of
the milky way of chains. Child whose pills as the mouth of sleep were
white and round. Child who lived outside the frame. Singing child,
flesh etched into the strings. Child wrapped in a sheet whose feet
stuck out like memory. Child who has cried in hallways. Child of the
mind on fire with voices. Of the ashes, child of my haunting. Dear
god, this child of the eyes.
*
Like a fly grown tall as a door, the hill
Bruted itself into a hospital. Two hundred
ears after Bicetre, Scipion, La Pitié
Moored the Ship of Fools in a dock
Anchored by rankness, dark bricks compiled
Themselves. Insanity enables
Architecture: stairs leading to nowhere,
Corrugated walls, labyrinthine incarnations
Streaked with yellow tape like straw.
The fourth floor no different perhaps
Than other wards, while unacknowledged
By the elevator, and with a scent
Transgressive to sanitization
; a queer, curtailed wandering to the halls.
*
who is this you I have found and fear
always to lose a mind-frond ridged
similar to mine yet torn more easily
primeval frayed by language without
junctures unstable as the last moon’s
roots who is this you woven from
a homelessness acknowledged and storied
an affinity with what undoes us at night bred
in your day-flesh and so
silenced by meds and so silenced who
is this you lunging from the bed
to greet me cocooned on your side
un-butterflied weeping from
the voice in your dream casting the glass
at strangers brightened with your sweet punk
singing who is this you on the highwire
my face catching your every gesture
yet incapable of containing
your fall
*
No holy locus this nor ever was
Such a place, though stabbed
With the gist of Christ –
Pallets of shit below crucifixes, hymnals
Cupped like water. In Bethlehem,
A man was found who twelve years
Had been chained for refusing
The Prior’s consolation.
A sign of recovery being
The return of discourse from
Delirium
To the beast-less plod of the Word
*
J’en voix les diables! old creased voice like a handkerchief
sepia toned oval as the virgin on the wall jesus
pacing in your skull evil as his fountain of crosses
toss on the rubber sheets speak a talisman language against
the darkness les diables beneficent as nurses but with tiny
bricked eyes and pills lodged beneath their fingernails you have
named me the Sun-Maid Raisin girl affixing a torn
portrait to your tongue sitting on your right-hand side
ordained while Billy Joel sings the tune of salvation
only the desert can save you with its white robed sand and
sky devout as the hour your mind burnt its insignia onto the
charts ten years old the coven of doctors noted wild as icebergs
around your bed the silence never since then an option
in the animal recesses of your head
*
At Bicetre (as it was in the beginning) madmen
Were displayed: splayed limbs, eyes agog, trained
Drools (so shall it be), dances feigned by whip
Or tidbits dangling from a mobile of hands.
As late as 1815, a penny was the going rate
To view such cruel tableaus, the money
Clenching its own tail in a circle of viability
And reform (world without end). So many
Visitors cycled through the spectacle
It was as if their hunger for nightfall
Had no means to be abated (Amen).
*
Dreamt door became an almighty fly washing its silk disease against
my glass with long black licks the window is seamed
with legs that dwindle in diamond shapes and the wood
splintered as lips kissing always into the distance
two white cups like geese beside my bed carry on their backs
dark notes not songs like Love Me Tender but scripts
not for A Streetcar Named Desire but thin soft waverings of nightlike
reminders the patchcord left in the trunk the meat burnt
the cunt not hollowed with nicotined fingers until it is a puppet
you can talk to slight and nodding as a sunflower
notes like this or the doctor’s illegible speech take the silent pill, son
or the one that makes my tongue lunge broken
eyelids swell like the sun going down skin worm unreadable
dreamt dances chained to bedpans applause of piss around
my ankles
*
Pain (as the fish’s blood is cold) once
axed from the attributes of the mad,
is never re-instated as absolute. Nor cold,
heat, nor hunger, work their way
into the records, so that women, naked
in below-zero cells, seemed impervious
to the climate while men yoked
to plows were said to labour hours
beneath the harsh sun’s whip and want
for nothing but further punishment.
Treatment proceeded from this illusion
until the body became but an appendage
to the animalized mind.
*
who has seen the stigmata on your shoulders threshed
by the rays from the time you lay face down
on the road in drought while your voices teemed
like geysers the sharp mask your ribs wore
when weeks the food was poisoned the tremor
the blue night you found refuge in a boxcar who
has heard you say I know l’enfer and it is both fire &
ice both the slow parched leak of breath and pain’s swift
icicle entrenchment
*
Apophany, the effulgence around objects,
a hagiography of the everyday (comb,
toothbrush, water glass invested with locutionary
powers), the recurrence of the eye, the I’s
bastion of voices, all these leashed
in the modus operandi of the ward.
Once, a doctor would appear
as the dead, Beelzebub, a prophet, speak
to the mad in their own language, seeking
to turn them from visions with a brute
inversion of their own images. Now
awakening is favoured through the durable
routine, a certain time for breakfast, therapy
after tea, lights out at nine. Further methods
selected by frustration – the subtle infliction of pain,
anger inflected in requests, a nurse yelling
parasite!, hoping to cast a mirror
that cuts an anchor in the face.
*
Parasite! Genet’s lice in his clothes an aliveness to his flesh
squandered by a century of clean zeroes pinned on the line like
gutted moons ciphers washed like chalices who in a dream stands
unsuckled night not the vector of thought never asked to live in
Gethsemene
to coil in the garden like a root its tree gone Judas on him
her mind against mine so rank I have choked in its sour-blind scent
the curt crawling word of her mouth til I am world
no longer but runt maggot of the rut in the floor plotting
deliverances devourings
*
The void of Goya’s madhouse,
flesh groveling in the hold –
to be Captain of cigarettes!
To dole out the saviors
in a room yellow as the endless
yammering tide! This is ordained
as act. Or cleaning your plate.
Receiving visitors in public. Quiet
masturbations in the bath. Correctly
taking down phone messages. Making
your bed. De Sade at Vincennes
burning his flesh to the ash of art
would likely now cost him a straightjacket
or a slot in psychiatry’s Most Wanted.
There is a piano provided in the lounge
but its tunes must be simple as speech
from which all of the screams
have been gutted.
*
to make not-silence I have tin the polished wood of Orpheus
keys drenched in silver and a reed I name
my backbone in this way I am a whole clang of people
asserting the dawn art’s negation in their uniforms
in the smooth white moons of their mouths speaking pill upon pill
in monotone the voices too neglect the film
the tilt of the firmest paintbrush forget the dialogue scrawled
between characters in a St. Denis coffee shop seems
only moments in life there is balance
when one sounds outside of all chains and in the mind
still reversed by night hear me chiming.
Page(s) 145-151
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