Admission Suite (a sequence of mad poems rediscovered)

Admission Suite

~blood whimsy is testimony too~

The poems that follow were written in the days just before, and just after, I was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital, Hamilton, in November 1977, diagnosed with acute schizophrenia.  (When I re-entered psychiatric treatment in 1990, after more than a decade avoiding it, I was told that the initial diagnosis had been incorrect, that instead I had bipolar disorder.) After the last untitled poem, the Red Book—a thick hardbound book with unlined pages and a pebbly red cover, which I had been rapidly filling with writing and drawings—went blank white. It stayed that way. I was, I’m told, completely catatonic for a time and then intermittently so (I have relatively few, and very fragmented, memories of the eighteen months that followed).  I didn’t resume writing until 1979, some weeks after my discharge. I used a new notebook. The poem “fruit bat,” appropriately in the middle of the sequence, was written while I rode the bus from Toronto to Hamilton to be admitted, after doctors at North York General had stitched up the deep lacerations I had made in my abdomen—my “self-Caesarean”—and elsewhere on my body. It is a wonder to me that I wrote the seven poems after it, given the regimen of heavy tranquilizers I was started on immediately. But ingrained habits die hard, and for a short time, drug uptake did battle with an artistic outpouring. It was after I’d showed these poems to staff, I’m also told, that hebephrenia—betokening radical incoherence, a childish beyond-reachness—became a stable entry on my chart. But these poems seem cogent to me, even now: in the sense (what other sense is there?) of giving expression to what I was experiencing at the time: of commenting meaningfully on my situation. If they did not push up against the bounds of what is communicative at least as often as they do, given their origins, I would have to disavow them. Rather than sheer nonsense, they seem like the best last flares of a mind going under. The last, the envoy-like “(untitled),” even reads like a memo from that departing self, hinting at a return—though a return not possible to believe in at the time, and delayed far beyond hoping. 

 (i)

What If a Man

what if a man should wake one morning

with white and trembling hands

his hair composed

(literally) of vanishing filaments

and his bones

rattling—rhythm

of seeds in a gourd

and what if this same man

feeling as angry

but also as carefree and sequent

as an acorn

dropped from a branch

should see his wife

standing in the doorway

and think only

of poppy seeds, scattering

would not this man soon give signs

he had developed

unholy loves and fears

  

(ii)

Self-Hate

cast your prejudicial eye

into the sea. as it falls

mumble something bitterly

about an eyepiece that floats.

(iii)

Rescue Attempt

i had an aunt with a heart condition

who lived in Saint John’s.

so i took the bus to see her

but the driver talked so much about his daughter

living in sin

that we both decided to go there

and bring her back instead.

i had no clear idea how to get there

and he only knew it was a harrowing place

full of inversions.

so we asked a boy with a chestnut on a string

who was playing

but he cracked me on the head with the chestnut

and said nothing.

i asked the driver if this was rude

and he agreed to help me whip him.

afterwards he asked me if i was hungry

and i said yes.

so we flayed a cucumber in the striped sun

and ate it.

(iv)

New Friends

      vase, milk,

      salt,

the coat in the hall;

      perfunc

     tory rows

of wine bottles: glass skins

     emptied

     by the

slender meshing of friends.

     now: cotton

     shirts, books,

pictures and windows: ancillary friends.

     after twenty

     years, a

tide has gone out. i am alone:

a delicate saw of bone under a bone sky.

(v)

Fishcleaning

i gut the slim forms you pass

me in silence:

            bass

            perch

            bullhead (black

            and pin-eyed)

puckish sunfish

bleeding a red dawn

pike. pike last. slashes

around the gills, and the river boa

shivers. he vomits up a minnow

and the little corn-coloured whelp

lies curled, inside the

scythe teeth.

as the guts are wrenched free and flung away

the pike’s jaw sags.

the wind

          scoots up a windstorm of scales.

                                                      the minnow

falls into the grass.          

(vi)

Fruit Bat

you called me mad:  when i hung upsidedown in a fruit

                                     tree whistling for fruit

you called me mad:  when winter came and i still

                                     hung black and folded

you called me mad:  when the wind shrieked and my 
                                                                       wings

                                     beat against my body for warmth

you called me mad:  when springsummerfall 

                                     the black pendent hung

you called me mad:  when i starved but couldn’t leave

                                     and sharp teeth gnawed my own belly

(vii)

Nightmare

itches

the body sends its prickling missive

warning of the skin-web and the filth of the spider

sitting hairy-legged where the hair was

holding the head rigid preparing to suck

the mouth an incredible jelly-bag of filth

SHAKE IT SHAKE IT SHAKE IT smear it into the pillow

churn its boneless malevolence into pulp

and fall back gasping into sleep

WAKE what seems seconds later to a new battle

a struggling of planes of sheet skin and darkness

a horrible dance of angles

the greatest most noiseless intersections clanging

                                                      like snow

hairball life drops suddenly and runs scuttling

across the room holding his ears

in fear in anger he begins to eat

he eats the furniture the wall he eats bill

sleeping next to me he eats all

he eats the meat hunched down over darkness

right down to the bone of light

a handsome gleaming bone of rapidly accumulating

                                                                        flesh

so exhausted i lay my head next

to this the day’s expanding muzzle

and am soon swallowed whole into sleep

(viii)

A Paltry Wakefulness

i wake on a psychiatric ward

amazed to notice my bottom becoming

soft, less definitely globed

sloping as stately as a woman’s

                           —hospital “food”!

visitors, visitations—

violet cauliflowered exhalations of pipe smoke

there is a film in front of my eyes

coming from my eyes

as if a grasshopper had attached to those skeins

and hopped away erratically

randomly unravelling them

(these are deep soft wounds)

i feel like thin metal

twisted under Giacometti’s fingers

to a stalk of fibrous leaning in space

but the bitterest irony is the self

imitating itself at every level

until even emptiness fails to inhabit

fails to be more real

than shard of slivered light

thrown from the throat

to be caught by the eyes and cloned into space

(ix)

Failed Inventory

the chair chaired the meeting

the pen penned the minutes

the ball balled the minutes into time

the pattern patterned itself

the colour coloured the pattern

the light lighted the colour

the colour coloured the light

the house housed secrets

the earth unearthed them

the space spaced the house from the earth

the fish fished in the river

the sand sanded down the rock

the rock rocked underneath

the I————

what does it do? i cried to the

chair pen ball pattern colour light

colour house earth space fish sand rock

but none of them could stop what they were doing to

                                                                answer

and the I the I the I the I

eyed everything nervously

(x)

The 1^st Order of Genius

the 1^st order of genius can extract huge sums with a

                                                           flourish

the 2^nd order wanders through a labyrinth in his

                               nightshirt carrying a candle

the 3^rd order is a more servile courtier. he reads

at home to his kids while golden hooves flash in

                                                              his head

the 4^th order has a tiered trachea, able to swallow

anything. he is called cudbag, but he eats

                                                      adjectives

the 5^th order appears at the corner of your vision

and walks across it, a nimble and professional

                                                               motion

the 6^th order says cuntshitprick how i hate to get up

                          in the morning and falls dead

there are many more orders of genius. while still

a gambolling freeloader in my mother’s womb, i counted

millions of them. others have documented them more

                                            thoroughly than i.

(xi)

Listen Paper

don’t call me honest. just flash the blade

that fetches an exact smear.

don’t set me up either as wise: my head is only my

neck looking in one direction.

paperglass scissorsstone, i love all sided things:

if i thought truth was round shit

i would sew up my asshole

and take to painting like a cubist.

i admit: what is clear

i encase in clear amber, hardening the illusion.

scissors stone, love is good. perhaps

because the cunt is warm and the cock is long

enough. goodday.

(xii)

Fish Live in the Toilet

Fish live in the toilet,

They come up to see me.

Fish live in the toilet,

How they flash merrily!

(xiii)

(untitled)

a madman cut and blessed the air

and read each day from a book of prayer

when he reached the last page out he fled

“you must write another book” it said