Psychiatric Love Poem Poem by richard ilnicki

When they put my wife summarily
into a psychiatric ward
for her own good
and for the good of others
they broke my already broken heart
into one thousand orphaned pieces.
They might as well have left me tongue-tied
and abandoned on a doorstep in a foreign country.
The emotional implosion scattered the shattered pieces
plus other impossible to identify or gather fragments
like buckshot from a shotgun.
It sliced my rudely ruptured insides
like a cleaver in the hands of an Old World butcher.

The pain tore at my stubborn visceral organs like incisors
in love with the raw meat of uncontrolled emotion.
Intelligent explosive devices designed to annihilate personality
ripped into my hippocampus
and began to divide my exposed mind even further.
I felt as if I were beig stretched across the Bed of Procrustes.
The synergy of my convolutions had become convoluted,
and I couldn't think straight. It was just as though my gooey fissures
had become a mass of Turkish taffy.

The much maligned and often misunderstood
Admissions Administrator began to speak in benign
electroconvulsives designed to unwittingly squeeze
the life out of me. Doctor ordered/animal tested
pungi stick meditative shotgun prescriptions
and psychogenic neurotransmitter driven cocktails
camouflaged by medical science and mounds of research paper
punctured my dry larynx, and shrapnel shards,
strategically placed land mines,
fueld each emotional swallow with the taste of napalm.

My kidneys and my urinary tract failed me.
My skin was swimming upstream hard
against the current like a determined salmon, the blind
following the blind to predetermined demise.
My eyes were floating in a sea of salt.
I had lost my balance. I smelled a corpse. I heard a howl.
The taste ofd death was stuck in my throat
and the anxiety of bleeding ulcers proliferated.
In less than an instant,
a nanosecond of physics squared,
I had become the proverbial 'dead man walking.'

I was now listlessly following a plastic nurse without a face
proudly wearing a big badge on her flat chest.
She was nonchalantly carrying her chart and a straightjacket.
I followed her ominous lead
down the frigid marbled halls towards the 'behavior ward, '
but not before stopping at the nurses's station,
the walls of which had been plastered by arrogance.
The smell of the donuts of indifference lingered in the air;
caffein lips and nicotine nostrils feigned compassion.
Further on down the hall we passed a bulletin board
announcing the next Thorazine Shuffle contest.
Other, less obvious signs read, ' Keep your hands
out of the cages! And Please don't feed the animals! '

Before long I would see my love and
at that macabre moment
I felt like a muddled, mindless, meandering ox
who was dragging a gurney behind him
through flooded, muddied, rancid rice paddies
on his way to a white funeral.