Poetry
Felix Thursday
Wonderland
A failed suicide gets you a 72 hour-hold at Oakcrest,
and a mark on your permanent record.
You can eat Jell-O with the fruitcakes,
play basketball with the 'Nam vets,
or scream at the wall.
It's incarcerated freedom.
Why go home?
I remember how the nurses stared at me
as I stood over your hospital bed.
As if I were the cause, or could offer
an explanation.
Your mother brought in your favorite dress.
Wearing it later, when you were free to wander
the tan-enameled halls, you looked macabre--
like a Victorian doll--Queen of the Sick.
A picture-perfect outcast of our age:
bandaged arms and blonde tendrils,
reading Balzac on your cot while
you waited for your rescuer.
You belonged there, maybe,
among the shattered remnants
of the wrong century you were born into.
At least, more than in the other world,
with its insane freeways and malls of despair.
And that's when I realized,
you didn't belong to me.
