Graduating to Wet Stones

Still Swallowing The Cure (with apologies to Anne) I've come back to the place of scattered senses. Come at midnight during a January ice storm without suitcase or security, giving up my purse and jacket for inspection, clutched in my hand a book of Sexton's poems. I sign by the inked-in X, realize this is no game, even insanity must stop a moment for formalities. Today mad voices creep into my room, curl around my head, fog my mind like the gray hazy cloud that fills the dayroom, when they allow us to smoke. It's always the same production: paranoid hides in the corner, clutches her pillow, addict paces the halls, wrings hands. Borderline smuggles a razor inside her shoe. And there are the permanent guests, whose pinched blurred faces blend in with the tasteless wall decorations. Ten years I've slipped in and out of this place, where the doctors advertise new drugs, and we paint ceramic flowers. I might have sailed overseas, flown to every exotic city, taken a lover, had a child- a daughter. But I've returned, recommitted, and yet the craziness isn't what it used to be. I've lost the hang of it. The innocence of it. My roommate in her so apropos insanity black ensemble, her manic laughter- even she seems small and colorless. Like my good trip pills, from Dr. AllTogether. The complimentary bon voyage assortment- pre-packaged colorless persona. And I keep swallowing the cure. I have come back to hang on the wall like a crooked picture. To be decommissioned like an obsolete steamer. Locked up like a multiple offender who was so hard up she fell in love with prison.

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