The Convalescent Poem by Lorcan Black

What has it come to that a town of mouths
should fall open upon my return?

Each familiar face that greets me
white as a saint and gleaming with curiosity.

I can hardly stand to look at them.

Clarity zooms through my blue veins-
how the weeks fade in the dark of their hollows,
they sputter like blue flames to nothing.

The horrors of the eternally lit ward-
its barrage of nurses, doctors,
and the manic woman pissing herself laughing in a corner,
convinced her blanket is a cat.

That and the male attendant who stood by the door
counting his fingernails while I,
hormonal and lithe at seventeen,
shower naked behind a screen.

Now these small things-
the bright, tight ring of the telephone,
voices enquiring after me so neatly, so nicely.

Smiles from my neighbours
I unfurl like gifts.

My roots jitter and creak,
each nerve is a tinderbox and my ego a stick-
stoking, stoking.

I have not slept in three nights.
I am half sure I may well take flight.

These are my wings, so heavenly,
and floating serenely behind me.
I made them myself.

All it took was glitter out of a tin,
plastic scissors and a few sheafs of paper
shook from the clutch of a catatonic.

And these pills?
They are my sacraments.

White and lovely, they fade my days
into the scrat and salt of middle-class discretion.

See how the wild element dies in my eyes?

Whisper it to me in dulcet tones.
Show me, love, the right incantations.
Teach me to still the disquieting sea.

Lend me hands that do not fidget and tremble
under gaze of the medical staff.

I am dumb.
I have no answers.

I have only an on-going silence
and a wish

for stillness.