Poet's Mental Illness And Poverty Poem by James McLain

Many of us were subsequently hospitalized and treated with shock therapy.
Erasing then redrawing all the borders of my mind
by losing all the picture's of my past.
I won't describe my past hospitalizations as a form of pain
this was more for them this form of therapy.
Violated, wet and warm it was a time of tragic shame
and electric light's induced this form of man our infamous history.
Hopelessness despair, and blind illusion- so black only as the inferno of Dante's mind can be- symbolic of the church and state and death,
and cold the fire in me.
I was like you shocked- and then the painful agony of my rebirth
and what to you it means.