Defaced

It’s actually a rather saddening story for now
I’d be in and out of hospital for the rest of my days, 
still my father thought it hilarious, how,
when I was first hospitalised I ran away,
on my first escorted walk in the grounds,
through a field and over a busy motorway

and up a serpentine trainline to the station
from which I made it to Scotland by train,
thinking there’d be a different jurisdiction -
but oh how my athletic efforts were in vain!
The police found me wandering that other nation
and took me south of the border again!

I’d been put under a curse unbeknownst to me...
forced to abide by the stringent rules,
I sat back in hospital writing poetry
in a waiter’s pad, inventing brave new schools,
smoking on the banks of the Styx of sweet tea,
calling the conspiracy of doctors fools!

I scored a question mark on the musical scales
in my writing, in that place so clean,
such a sterile-surfaced Hell, run by females,
while Rachel’s party far away on the green
summit of Parliament Hill went down with pale ales
and left me to dream of the space in-between. 

I’ve got a degree since then. My feeling is
that the ill are capable of increased lucidity
but I rue the new remit: not to dream with open eyes,
nor await the future with rapt uncertainty,
not to plug my senses in the mains, but de-stigmatise
mental illness. It doesn’t come naturally.

John F B Tucker
 
If you have any thoughts on this poem,  John F.B. Tucker would be pleased to hear them.