IMAGE: ‘colorful-pills-on-white-background’ http://www.aol.co.uk
When I think of all the time I have spent gazing desperately at the dirty, putrid walls of psychiatric hospitals, it must run into years! I have festered within their aging, flaking, plastered surfaces, my depressed brain rotting like a decomposing apple, rancid to the core. Within these walls I have journeyed to the realms of the heavenly host, and transformed into the blessed mother Mary herself, relishing in the delightful delusions and the grandeur they afford to one normally so mediocre. I have flirted and flitted like a demented, damaged butterfly, clad in nothing but a faux-fur jacket, crimson-stained lips betraying my incorrigible and licentious, ever-escalating mania.
One of the set-in-stone givens was the ritual of the drug trolley. It was there at the exact same time every night. A lighthouse of medicinal salvation, a beacon of neurological anaesthesia. It was a bringer-together of every flavour in the recipe of psychiatric diagnostics. A psychological, psychiatrical chicken soup for the soul.
This poem was written during a lengthy stay which spanned most of a year. It is still one of my favourites…
DRUG TROLLEY
Hail! Oh righteous vessel,
Bearer of great gifts to
Those with faith in
This Messiah of psychiatry.
Wondrous drugs
Of plenteous magnitude,
Neurological, psychological,
Sumptuous licorice allsorts.
Plastering, sanding, glossing
Over crumbling foundations,
Psychological invalidity,
Circuitry overload.
Come now,
Swallow those meds,
They’ll send away the voices,
Ease away the pain.
You know you have to cooperate,
For we have needles
Longer than your arm,
Must have complete submission.
Glazed and dazed,
The damaged and cracked,
Assert the tablet hierarchy,
‘Only two tonight dear?’
‘I take fifty a day, you know?’
The climax,
Blessed consumption of the
sacred pills and holy water,
Modern Deistic ceremony,
After the manner of Sigmund Freud.
After the hoards disperse to
Separate dimensions of time and space,
Time and delusion,
Broken, shattered fragments
of a once-whole mirror,
They praise their holy trinity,
In the name of the
Trolley, Drug and Holy Nurse.
AMEN.
©Sarah Drury
