For the Tenth Grade Me Reading Howl Right Now
My stays in the psych ward are a traumatic blur lasting more than twelve years. As a dangerously depressed teenager I planned to get a tattoo with a similarly depressed friend of the "Howl" refrain "I'm with you in a Rockland." It never happened, but if Allen Ginsberg weren't a pedophile I might still get those words in recognition of the parts of me I left on those wards.
I am forever with the screamers, the shaking, the catatonic, those writhing on the ground awaiting Klonopin that never comes or pinned to a wall and injected, the sobbing and snotty on 1:1s, the pacers, the Nicorette chewers, the scapegoats, the elderly ghosts, the food hoarders, the starving, hysterical, naked.
This poem is a collection of moments, from my first psych stay and first thrown chair to all the pretty blonde nursing students sitting 10 feet away doing homework instead of noticing me cutting with an apple juice lid. This poem is about what it was like walking into a new "bedroom" and identify the metaphysical exits as if they were lit with neon signs.
I gave psych wards more than a decade of my life, and what I got in return was this poem.
In this print, the background chatter is brought forward. It invokes the hundreds of scars on my body and adds a dark ambiance that makes the exit sign glow.
“For the Tenth Grade Me Reading ‘Howl’ Right Now,” Elijah Patterson
There’s nothing romantic about hospital food or gowns,
cotton worn thin by bleach and bodies before yours,
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with too much jam
that will– for years – remind you of flying chairs,
a pretty twenty-two-year-old standing with her foot in the door
while you shit, watching you read and sleep and rock and mostly stare,
a hallway of locked door your fingers itch to open.
I am forever with the screamers, the shaking, the catatonic, those writhing on the ground awaiting Klonopin that never comes or pinned to a wall and injected, the sobbing and snotty on 1:1s, the pacers, the Nicorette chewers, the scapegoats, the elderly ghosts, the food hoarders, the starving, hysterical, naked.
This poem is a collection of moments, from my first psych stay and first thrown chair to all the pretty blonde nursing students sitting 10 feet away doing homework instead of noticing me cutting with an apple juice lid. This poem is about what it was like walking into a new "bedroom" and identify the metaphysical exits as if they were lit with neon signs.
I gave psych wards more than a decade of my life, and what I got in return was this poem.
In this print, the background chatter is brought forward. It invokes the hundreds of scars on my body and adds a dark ambiance that makes the exit sign glow.
“For the Tenth Grade Me Reading ‘Howl’ Right Now,” Elijah Patterson
There’s nothing romantic about hospital food or gowns,
cotton worn thin by bleach and bodies before yours,
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with too much jam
that will– for years – remind you of flying chairs,
a pretty twenty-two-year-old standing with her foot in the door
while you shit, watching you read and sleep and rock and mostly stare,
a hallway of locked door your fingers itch to open.
