Debbie cackles and rambles down the silent hall

Her powder blue dress, inverted and urine soaked

Eyes distant, she parades, masked in the smile

Of the lost and the demented

Lois, mismatched plaid and rolled up denim

Searches the ceilings for answers, finding walls

Ambling down corridors blindly, a pinball in play

Jimmy occupies the gurney near me, he is just visiting

From a remote planet, awaiting the signal

Judiciously chronicling the idiosyncrisies of us mere mortals

To return, a hero, to his distant world of alien works

Alien thinking, and a blanket of forgiveness

Marla is a ghost haunting her present, pale and placated

Medication and mothers money anchor her spirit

As her soul departs one experience at a time

Soiled wristbands, hide the holes, she bled her shame

But from the crimson puddle, the stench of "Daddy"

Reflected, a stain that all her fluids couldn't remove

My meloncholy interupted, Dr. Diane and thorazine therapy

Little paper cups, single file, swallow, back to delerium

Coherency strained through a sieve, ebony and dredlocks

Screams from the wheelchair, waving and wailing at imagined

replays

A dead and drunken husband, a kitchen knife

Bared back, broken and bruised, mistaken for a pincushion

A pulsing sensation, a hesitant hand explores the staples

binding closed the vent,  where then demons were freed

And I was caged, the sofa swallows me, stares follow me

Through the miasmic mental fog, I hear Jack Nicholson

The screen, the actors, the realization, "One flew over the cuckoos

nest"

Chest pains, insanity is setting in and I can't decide on one

Do I laugh histerically or cry........

                   Bitter irony to be sane amidst insanity!

-WW<o:p></o:p>