mental illness

I am covered with hands
This is a dance done hundreds of times before
A jaw-clenching, back-arching spectacle
I wear a plastic crown and people
Dressed like ghosts slip needles beneath my skin
I can't breathe, can't see anything now
Time has gone away
In the darkness I hear things
I never want to think about again
And then a crack of blurred light
Pushes my eyes open and the world
Is upside down and mirror-imaged
A searing neuroleptic nausea like the
Dizzy lysergic soak-sense washing over everything
I am covered with wires
And gagging on bile
Intubed and succinylcholinated, unable
To put moments back to back
To make any sense of noise or color
Was it paralytic or praecox?
Was it submission or stupefaction?
Am I really who they say I am?
Was I such a failed creature
The legacy of burnt bodies
Cracked teeth and sternums
Surgical sterilization
Meduna's camphor-in-oil
Bleeding lips and tongues
Insulin comas
Ablations of the frontal lobe
Sleep deprivation
Acetylcholine, histamine, nitrous, ether
Atropine and scopolamine
Miltown tinctured lancets
Scared, suspicious glances from
Faces that leer all around in a yellow haze
The mazes of the mind impossible to escape
Floating in space without a frame of reference
Pointillist dreams and nightmarish realities
Endless regression of fractal infinities
Despair and elation
But no middle ground of safe action
Nothing to latch on to
No underlying foundation
No pleasant belief in divinity
Now people are speaking all around me
A few of them are smiling as I
Shuffle into clothing and out of a building
And there is someone I'm sure I know
And she is kind and caring
And I must be such a mess of creation
To be led as I am childlike and wondering
Step inside a vehicle and gaze
Silently at the city's random sights
And struggle for the words or the gestures
That will make me human again
The eye of a tornado with my
Hands crossed in my lap
A blank expression on my face
And profound inner confusion.