Mad men dream of electronic sheep, dancers in cold rooms making up medicines for the war raging on inside their minds.
“Take your pills! We are watching you!” they say, smiles, braided hair, crisp white smocks, mocking us who now sit on the edge of our beds and color our legs with the blood of our own demise.
Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine, I am living for my sins, trapped in a shell, thrown into a dark corner, giving the daily bread but no wine, no butter, just bread, the water spilled on the floor, drowning the city of the dust, the damned, the world outside.
They try to reach me, understand, but they cannot. We cannot understand that which we cannot experience first hand, we cannot get inside your mind, even if you want to let us, we stand outside, in the cold, wind blowing, the dreamless sleep taunting us with peeks inside but not revealing.
The medications are just to appease your need to believe we are helping you help yourself.
“Take this! Take this!” the mocking bird mocks and cries out. “If you don’t, there’s always THE TREATMENT!”
Treatments this, treatment that, give up, give in, lose all hope that this is it.
Writing in a little black book; dreams, poems, thoughts from a mad man, all going down into the journal, to be read at a later day, judgement day?
Madness, madness, boil and toiled, wish wash, leaning over the edge, peering over, to see what the eye can see, and the mind loses grip and falls head over heels to a demise, to a fate worst than death, death being a relief.
Shame.
The buzzards feed on broken dreams, souls burning bright against a crimson sky.
The nightmares never end, they just go into hiding when the day light breaks, to once again march into sight when the sun sets and the pillow calms.
Medication comes at 8. And then again at 2. The nurses smile, hand the cups off, in some religious ceremony, smiles again as the throat moves up and down.
Check.
All gone.
Night time, second dose, helps to sleep, to calm the nerves.
Or so they say, they say it so much, they almost believe it, their sale pitch.
9:45. AM or PM? It does not matter, time stops when you enter that door. The art time comes, it seems they want us to draw, pretty pictures, of sun rises, sun sets, a dog killing its owner with a baseball bat.
“THAT is not appropiate!” the nurses, the doctors screech. The family is here. They are shaking their head.
“The sun is not a killing machine!!” my sister says, we can see the tears in her eyes.
I lower my head. In worlds now gone, the sun is a killer, blazed in firey heat, millions of worlds, now erased, gone, destroyed by its hands.
Chemical imbalance. Mindless. Wandering through broken streets, glass thrown here, there and everywhere, to cut the traveler deep.
“If this does not stop, we will have to go to drastic measures!” the director, eyes deep, suit black like midnight, throws out at me and my family standing there.
Drastic measures, cutting skin, opening the soul, to bleed out the insanity, it would seem, though no one ever came back right from that drastic measure.
“Cold baths! Shock!” old man said from his rocking chair. “They cut your brain out and feed it to the crows!” he laughed. I smiled. Years ago, many years, old man was a saint, a college professor some say.
Now, he was just an old coot, rocking in his rocking chair, scar across his face where the doctors gave him the cure.
Laughter, the children laugh, it is a good thing to laugh, but laugh too much, and they call you mad.
WANDERING WHERE I AM GOING! 