Bedlam, Real & Imagined Poem by Sheena Blackhall
Bedlam, Real & Imagined
Ophelia, Miss Havisham, Lear
Pitt the Elder, George III
Jonathan Swift & Richard Dadd
Blake, master of paint and word
Bertha Mason, Woolf, John Clare
Robert Fergusson, Sylvia Plath
Van Gogh, Lowell, Jack Kerouac
Trod that same uneven path
Coleridge, Tennyson, Edvard Munch
Dali, Winehouse, Georgia O'Keefe
Nero, Bunyan, Caligula
Some had lives of scant relief
Emily Dickinson,Paul Gaugin
Michael Jackson, Howard Hughes
Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol
Life on the edge, très malheureux
How to relief such maladies?
Trepanningelectric shocks, the whip
Chains &handcuffs, manacles
Straitjacket..leeches, made to strip
Bloodletting, blisters, gags, straw beds
Violent shower baths, padded cells
Sideshows, where folk paraded past
To gawp and laugh, despite the smells
Perhaps a clitoridectomy? Remove a female's labia?
This was one doctors cure for all
For quashing girls' hysteria
Tertiary syphilis, shell shock too
Those hidden hurts the war inflicted
Sassoon and Wildred Owen knew
PTSD for the conflicted
And now, care in community
No more asylums…street or prison
On liquid cosh, to take or not
To ostracise, treat with derision
For every man must have the right
To live in suffering, in plain sight
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5/4/2024 2:49:25 AM # 1.0.0.1119
Aloha and Cheers Sheena! " E" ? Whatever! " Top Shelf" The obvious Prose of the Decade! You, My Dear have made it easy on me. Now ifin " WE" , an implication thus; could get the all of humanity to stop fussin and commit to that on single species togetherness. Not in this lifetime? Most probably not! You have hammered it! All of the best from this life, to you, and to all of our relations... Michaelw1two