The Seventh Room
The ending is water’
Whispered a crow,
As I step slow—Out, out of the asylum.
My body, which isn’t mine, dragged all way,
Needles falling on the grey floor,
Some I took off—
Others were inserted for too long.
Hideous as a monster;
The survivor of the one thousand years bloodshed
Finally managed an escape, with a book and papers’ shreds
At the end of the aisle of patients’ beds,
I know there is a staircase leading to an exit
I ran downward.
I am almost out;
I could smell the water and see its drips on the floor,
I dreamt that I felt the sands of the seashore touching my feet,
And that I saw the moulted feathers of gulls
Almost there, I thought!
A sea that shall wash the years of weep,
I dreamt of slipping among the river’s reeds,
With the palm of my hands covered in leaves—
I reach out,
But there come the thieves,
All is gone—gone, gone. A dream is gone.
They close the doors,
Catch the mad who tried to touch the shore!
I succumb. I am numb.
They locked me up in the Seventh Room,
A white room with an iron bed,
Pictures of previous patients hung on the wall,
A trained doctor and a saint came out of the door
I could never run even if I crawl.
Present as I am—in front of the ones who created me
The men of virtues—
They unwrap me,
Naked as I first came;
I had nothing to impress them with;
These are my hands
My pale skin, my faint hair;
Bare and unpolluted for their entertainment.
A woman of many others like I
A woman is never born anew. I cry.
They had me sewn together with a glue
Stitched up—with wires and threads,
I was made out of corpses’ skins
And fed lies in my dreaming beds
They gave me a name,
And taught me how to live in shame
I swallowed it whole.
They operate. I am paralysed.
Like a cadaver: only I see and hear.
Another animal experiment
The crowd shoves to see.
It’s done. I am re-soaked into the plague.
Or so they believe.
Five feet and four inches tall,
I inherited the nothingness—
I breathe oxygen and occupy space.
I exist. I exist. I exist.
I learned how to drink the poison
And not die—
The trick is one swallow at a time.
Shackles and pills
Do it smiling—do it until you become a hard rime.
Wired to my roof. Threaded to a man above,
They call him God. But I call him my puppeteer.
They called this a life, I call it an act.
Another chapter on stage.
I dream—
Chaos is voiceless.
I thrust back to the sea, the waves rise and swell,
They run to my lungs and fill me,
I could drown
I could possibly die!
But I exist—
Somewhere. Elsewhere. As a full moon.
All shall crack asunder
All shall dissolve in
And I shall end—
In water.
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