Pilgrim State Mental Hospital Still Life
alan catlin
Home team cards fail to excite her eyes
fixed on the black bars closing in the windows,
locking the electroshocking scream inside the powder
blue walls, where she lives, finger painting bright
murals, tropical sunsets of lost continents.
inhabiting other worlds; antideluvian dream people
leap from her lips all those solitary nights she
sits watching the tides come in, overtaking her
room. suppressing her instinct to breathe, even
now, outside, in mid-summer, unleashed, sitting on
a bench with her son, hazelnut eyes loaded up
with tranguilizing drugs, she speaks wildly of
interplanetary baseball in decompression bubbles
that burst in the ears of the stupefied child,
sitting, transfixed, by her side watching a
pennant race that transcends the interlocking stars.