3629. OUTSIDE THE MENTAL HOSPITAL

OUTSIDE THE 
MENTAL HOSPITAL

Gyrate, all you people. These are ominous

places  -  all filled with lineages without age,

blind people blind with rage, and every

archetype you'd ever come 'round to imagine.

Let's begin : My grandmother died here, a

hopeless, wasted wastrel, bent and broken

and mute and stupid to my 9-year-old eyes,

with tense silence and a loss of words. Yes,

it was 1959. And now? All around me I have

to listen to people saying their stupid things  -

all those words she never said, and the words

she'd have liked to have said; all her silences

enforced by a rare and dense stupidity of time.

It is now that silence I'd like to enforce, that

I wish for and wish she never had. I wish to

be silent, but I wish too to speak for her, for

what she never said, for what she never had.

Her. My words are already lined up along

the corridors of the rooms where she was 

forced to live. No more, no more, the stark

dignity of essence or entry or being or presence.

-

March has gone already, and April  -  all those

brown and windblown grasses greening now,

in May, have become something else  -  a

sheetwise glimmer, a summer slide, a joyous,

wavy happenstance of all that we are given

over to live. The rain, in showers, filters down

on a grandmother's silent words. All these

years later, it is that which I am hearing : a

sudden newness to very old, unspoken words.

On all sides, the world rolls coldly away.

-

'The Easter stars are shining above lights that

are flashing  -  coronal of the black  -  nobody

to say it  -  nobody to say  -  Pinholes!' Gyrate,

all you people; these are ominous places.