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Hospital Collection: NamelessThere's an anorexic patient with me
in the mental health ward.
I've never heard her speak
or touch her lips
to the plastic hospital food.
Her skull is wrapped in
the alien fingers of
a pale feeding tube.
And I wonder if she's still
the keeper of her soul.

Her wrists are as frail as
the silver threads
of delicate spider webs.
Her skin is fragile
and paper-soft.
I've never heard her speak
or touch her lips.

She's just another patient
(without a name).
Her eyes are lifeless,
lost.
And I wonder what that makes
me;
another patient
who sees only
her disease.
Touching The FloorWords are power, she said.
Don’t ever let them take it from you.

Grief is your sanity, she said.
Don’t be afraid
To let your tears fall.

Silence is reality, she said.
Don’t ever let them touch the quiet in you.

Safety is a dream, she said.
Don’t wake up
Keep going back to sleep.
1000 Paper CranesI.

We whispered prayers into the corridors
while I spoke into your ribcage,
telling lies to our skeletons
to help you understand.

you said they loved
watching me wax poetic
while I dripped candlelight into your hands.

we watched the dust motes
cover our skin
while I taught you how to fly.
(you were always too afraid to fall
and too afraid to land).

II.

It wasn't lovesongs we sang;
it was half-forgotten hymns.

we never wanted to believe
but you said ghosts exist
without compassion,
and without sins.

I told the doctor
his medication clipped your wings.

III.

I fed you sweet words
tucked in between
candy-canes
and licori
InstantUnder the suffocating lights of the dance floor
and the overwhelming heat,
another stranger asks me for a dance.
He whispers his name in my hair
but I don't have a
name.
and I don't want to know.

Sometimes medication
disconnects emotion
and you lose your soul.
and I don't know how I feel.
I feel -
nothing.

...

His hands are on my hips
and he's too close
lips pressed against my cheek.
He touches my hair,
my face.
Tells me that I'm beautiful.
Runs gentle fingernails
over my back
and tries to speak.

I'm spaced
out.
Something turned
a light off in
my head.

He kisses my hands,
my head
and I can't react.
Everything fe
Epinephrine WhisperI bleed fear
and breathe paralysis

Every day
drug myself into sanity
and drip with the rain
every drop a thought
falling out of my soul
and tripping out of my brain.

I crawl screaming and sobbing
to the phone
and listen for hours to
the white noise of
the static dial tone.
My fingers shake
as I call
a helpline
the crisis hotline
emergency
suicide prevention
child youth mental health team.

The receptionist
is new.
she doesn't know
my voice.
she doesn't know
my face.
she doesn't know
my name.

I don't have a
name
I don't have a
face.

My therapist isn't here today.
"Sorry. Would you like to leave a
message?"
TransientI’m seducing you with sorrow
Taking you down
Into the deep nothing
Of a hollow soul
Listening for the despair of
Empty heart beats
As they fall quietly
Into the rhythm of decay.

Seeping through your
Sun-stroked skin
I’m drowning you with sickness
That you long to follow deeper
Leading you into a place
Where tears penetrate the sweetest sleep
And gentle hands
Are twisted leaves
Against your body’s form

I can take you further, here
Down into a world
With just the promise of better days
And laughter void of illness.
Solemn swears of tasteless dreams
That you’ll be wishing to believe
Once you’ve f
SalvationsI woke with a barcode tattooed into my wrist, over a scar.
nurses conspired in soft tones
tracing the sound of schizophrenia into an injection needle
to hush the patient in the bed next to mine.
N4877294.
their voices echo in my bones.

I stopped breathing in your hands
and you lifted me like
a drop of snow, to drink.
whispering intraveneously into my lungs
I breathe light
and  swallow myself whole.

black holes moved under your skin,
and your limbs felt soft, diseased.
N487723.
hours passed
and we prayed for release.

we searched for wings in the corners of wards
breathing prayers into our hands,
pressing them between the out
Hospital MorningI'm woken for medication
I swallow them down,
and listen for the sound
of the grey trolley wheels
squeaking across the cold linoleum.
A small cup of fruit juice
and a white bread roll
are the only things that don't
taste like antiseptic or anaesthetic.
I ignore the cardboard cereal
it its little box
the canned fruit
and plastic food.
Every morning I take medication,
fruit juice,
and a little bread roll
to start the day.
First Night
Rosie lay across from me in the cold, dark ward. She was agoraphobic; and when she laughed, her hands fluttered and she tapped her feet against the floor.

It was late when they carried me in. I had no name; just a plastic bracelet with a barcode and my patient number, address and date of birth. N447584. But the doctor and nurses just called me “the O.D girl”.

She smiled at me as they attached wires and a heart monitor; as they dressed me in a white hospital gown with the ties undone, leaving my spine naked and exposed.

Somehow I can’t find the strength to tie it up, though I’m afraid of the strangers’ hands on me.
HannahThey hold her down
and force sedation with a drink.
"Swallow" is their mantra,
a hollow injection while she screams
a black touch
a drop
her blood
while the nurses cluck their tongues
and take her away.
ThereisnosleepinnothingnessI don't want to touch myself with my hands
for fear of swallowing myself into the nothingness
that exists beneath the the patterned lines
and empty hollows of my skin.
I inhale, and smell like gravity
and the sweet echoes of sickened flesh.
Light fades, and the shadows stand, whole
over my body in the empty room.

Then, between the pressures of my mind
there was only silence.
A stillness in the absence of alien thoughts.
I'd wake in the middle of the night
or in the early hours of morning
staring into the mirror
into the blackness.
the empty space where my face must be,
breathing in the dark
where time was tangible
and I was
IanDrops of blood
the soft fall
Hush
as they mark his skin
an inky black.
When he smiles,
the jagged lips
of his throat smile gospel secrets too
that only the half-living and the dead know.
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Atmospheric Black and Whites

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Atmospheric Black and Whitesby =RosaryOfSighsx

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©2008-2013 =RosaryOfSighsx
Category: Journals / Art News / Photography

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March 26, 2008
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