Out of the House of Bedlam

"These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to feel if the world is there and flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances joyfully down the ward
into the parting seas of board
past the staring sailor
that shakes his watch
that tells the time
of the poet, the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam."
  -from Visits To St. Elizabeths by Elizabeth Bishop

Institutionalised is the one place that I was most likely to end up that I thought I'd never be. Lucky for me, I wasn't in very long. But just long enough, just long enough...

In the home resides a man who cannot help but run his mouth, and spews whatever offal there resides at all who pass, all who would sit to share a coffee. I don't drink coffee, strictly a tea man, but in the home there is no tea. Maybe I should've been hospitalised in Britain...

In the home resides a hunchbacked crone, speaking random words and things that sound like half-truths and riddles. She sat near me at my table, where I was busy inventing a card game, and proceeded to almost make sense. She would smile the small smile of a soul with a secret and look up at me from under raised eyebrows with eyes that shone too bright for the rest of her withered ancient frame and speak nonsense things that I desperately wanted to be intelligible truths. Then she would ask me to define "Amoeba" and the location of EPCOT, for weren't there one to the north? and the spell would break and once again I would be not in some Arthurian romance talking to the withered crone, the witch, who could reveal soul-shattering truths to me if only I had ears to listen and the mind to puzzle them out... No longer there, but in the home, the House of Bedlam, the Vista Hospital, where the most that had happened all day was the steady commentary of the turtles that we could watch mate for hours upon end from the windows we passed on the way to the cafeteria.

A young man, R. we'll call him, got out on my first day and was back on my last, wearing scrubs this time instead of street clothes...

It was a very sad and strange place to me, and I am glad to be out. Now I have to see a group all day twice weekly for at least the next 60 days, whaich I am unhappy of. I have no desire to be in a hospital setting again so soon! But, the program is going to help me get back to school this fall. Everyone seems hopeful of my asperations of a professorship, and intent to help me achieve it, so I'll go. Thorazine tablets in pocket I'll go, back unto the maw of madness, back into the House of Bedlam, back to where the lines of the world faded and reality thinned for me...

I'll go.