Me, Instutionalized? REVISED 2026

When they sent me to the rubber room, I didn’t realize the staff wore the straightjackets too.

It’s a glitch in the logic— the way they draw needles and offer a rainbow of pills the moment I wake in these drab quarters. A room with a view of a bathroom stripped of its locks.

They’re convinced I’ll find a way to end it behind a closed door— as if I’d spend my afternoon jamming a finger down my throat, hoping to choke on my own history.

Dinner isn't exactly steak and eggs. It’s green-tinted pizza and a pile of slimy spaghetti writhing in a watery, questionable red. And the arts and crafts room? Please. I’m a bit past the age where finger paints solve a soul-ache.

I should have kept my mouth shut. I shouldn't have admitted I wanted to play the Queen of Hearts and call for my own head. But it was never really my life to take, anyway.

Now, I’m here, singing "poor me" to a psychiatrist who calls this a sanctuary. I call it a warehouse filled with people just slightly more fractured than I am.

God, I love doing my seventy-two.

Not.

Now I’m terrified to go back out— to face the "fucking day" again. But I’m fine. I’m just fucking fine. One day at a time, they say, sending me packing with a dowry of benzos to keep the edges blurred until the world stops looking like a threat.

I emerge like a princess at her first ball, trading tattered rags for something decent. I face the light.

With courage? Probably not. Maybe. Definitely not.

I’m back out here now, unencumbered by padded walls, bleeding a quiet kind of insanity. Still reeling from the cure designed to make me "better." Sanity was never really my thing, anyway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Dream of Purple Skies- Revised 2026

I Dream of Purple Skies The Transition I enter the Dark Tunnel, but the coming Light is not a question; fear is a language I have already begun to forget. The darkness is merely a pause, shattered by pinnacles of brilliance— first in flashes, then in steady pulses of hope. I crawled through the decay of the last world, but here, I walk. I have no voice for the "in-between," that sacred transit where the soul is unmade and remade, focused only on the Forward. I see my hand, yet it is not the hand I knew. I am being guided Home, anchored by a trust that has finally outgrown the borders of my imagination. The Un-Night The "un-night" recedes as the flashes quicken. I move without feeling my way, for I am no longer walking; I am led. The Unknown has lost its teeth; Faith has fulfilled its promise. In this tunnel, transition is the ultimate freedom. I have waited a natural lifetime for these final steps, aware of a body that is no longer a burden, but a garment of light. ...
Read more

Condemned Building

  I kicked at the broken glass of words in the condemned building, where sonnets and poems were once written, where there were once books and notebooks of ideas, where there were once book shelves full of books  now  replaced by broken glass and broken  dreams once words birthed as ideas in the air. A generation of ideas put to paper and spoken to audiences- -everywhere- Shattered memories at my feet seen once as beauty. I ask myself why I’m here in this condemned building Where nothing can be resurrected but fleeting memories of what once was. On the floor now as broken words from a time long ago. What I thought of as a golden calf cannot prosper  as that idea is dead and broken like the glass of the condemned building. I see past it where true life lives in real living breathing words that cannot die. Words that forgive and see past my own folly of false idols and false beliefs Never to be believed at all.
Read more

Me Institutionalized? REVISED 2026

 When they sent me to the rubber room, I didn’t realize the staff wore the straightjackets too. It’s a glitch in the logic— the way they draw needles and offer a rainbow of pills the moment I wake in these drab quarters. A room with a view of a bathroom stripped of its locks. They’re convinced I’ll find a way to end it behind a closed door— as if I’d spend my afternoon jamming a finger down my throat, hoping to choke on my own history. Dinner isn't exactly steak and eggs. It’s green-tinted pizza and a pile of slimy spaghetti writhing in a watery, questionable red. And the arts and crafts room? Please. I’m a bit past the age where finger paints solve a soul-ache. I should have kept my mouth shut. I shouldn't have admitted I wanted to play the Queen of Hearts and call for my own head. But it was never really my life to take, anyway. Now, I’m here, singing "poor me" to a psychiatrist who calls this a sanctuary. I call it a warehouse filled with people just slightly more ...
Read more