Bleak Psychosis Poem by David Lewis Paget

They had kept her in a padded cell
Since she tried to slash her wrists,
Throwing herself against the walls
In what were psychotic fits,
‘She's genuinely paranoid,
The outlook's not so bright,
We thought that she might come out of it
If we kept her overnight.'

She'd been in there for a week or more
And there wasn't any change,
‘If we put her into a coma, we
Could rearrange her brain.
She said that her name is Alice,
Can't remember her address,
We found her down on the river bank,
In a blood-stained party dress.'

We'd just perfected a way to probe
The thoughts in another's mind,
I wanted to try it out on her
And the doctors murmured ‘fine! '
We placed her into the helmet that
Would analyse her brain,
While I hooked in to another feed
That would read her, just the same.

I found us both on a river bank
In the shade of a willow tree,
Beside us there was a rabbit hole
As large as it could be,
Alice reached and she grabbed my hand
And we dived into the hole,
She said, ‘You're going to see horrors
That will terrify your soul! '

We landed down in a garden, saw
A man in a stovepipe hat,
Sitting and drinking cups of tea
With a grinning Cheshire cat,
She took a sip and we shrank on down
With the table up so high,
The grass was looming above our heads
And reaching up to the sky.

But on the ground was an ‘Eat Me' cake,
And Alice took a bite,
We suddenly zoomed on up to the roof,
That was almost twice my height.
Alice was crying a flood of tears
And she said, ‘It gets much worse!
Wait ‘til we eat the mushrooms here,
You'll think that we've both been cursed.'

Half of the mushroom said ‘To Grow',
And the other half ‘To Shrink.'
She nibbled on one, before she gave me
A chance to even think,
It dropped us into a raging flood
And we swam to meet our fears,
As all the animals floated past
In a river of Alice's tears.

They could have been magic mushrooms, or
It could have been cake with hash,
For Alice's mind was full of things
That came and went in a flash,
A caterpillar appeared just then
A hookah in its mouth,
A rabbit, dressed in a waistcoat, checked
Its watch, went travelling south.

I didn't know what to do by then
For Alice was falling apart,
We found ourselves in a courtroom
With the King and the Queen of Hearts,
The Queen was screaming at Alice that
She might as well be dead,
While Alice told her to stuff it, and
The Queen said, ‘Off with her head! '

I'd seen enough and I ripped it off
And I shut the system down,
Alice sat in a daze with all
The doctors gathering round,
‘I think that Alice has gone too far,
Her brain has turned to fluff,
I tell you - what she has going on,
You couldn't write the stuff! '

17 February 2013