The Way Day Breaks

“This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at Mclean’s” — Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue”

i.

Waking in the black that comes for the living

only before dawn, we’re wrung from our beds

like damp hand towels: used; leaking blood

(some of us). They take our weights & vitals

in vials, one by one; the rest restlessly await

our next & nightly judgment, draped across

the vile mauve milieu couches like what

the purple sea coughs up, looking at

(without seeing) the five A.M. news:

eating disorders, the newscaster claims, happen most often to

good people. This roomful of good people (what better

collective noun for us than this?) giggles,

or nearly cries. Leslie Nielsen dies quietly

& surely in the night. & a boy my age, already dead, falls

from the airplane’s wheel well in real time

into a nearby city, where a fellow runner finds

his body.

ii.

Perfection has always been the story

my body has wanted to tell —

& for everyone who has ached

to understand how perfection can align

so intuitively with self-destruction,

there is someone who has told me

they’d kill

for my control.

iii.

Well –

I tried.

iv.

Waking in the white that comes for the dead

only before waking, everything is still,

the same, another morning at Mclean’s,

the steady drag of traffic on the pre-light highways,

the blackened cars moving behind their headlights

like the baggage ghosts carry past,

& all I can see

is the boy from the plane:

my age. The anguish

on that runner’s face:

their hell. & I,

who half my life have sleepwalked

into the sky, wake up halfway to the ground, eyes

ripped wide:

v.

this is not the story I want to live to tell.

vi.

I am sick to death of wanting to die. I want all that time

back. I want to burst back in time, cradle

the soft, fearful corpse-in-waiting I have been

until they feel safe inside those rabbit bones

– home. & alive,

for the first time.

But I don’t want to die –

not today.

Tomorrow – yes – FINE –

vii.

but today

viii.

I am standing up & climbing back

inside the airplane. I’m taking us in

for a safe landing. I want all the pieces

of me together at the end,

so my discoverers can say,

AHA! So these are the hands with which

they dismantled the murder machine

of their mind. These are the legs

that kicked back. & these –

THESE –

etched around their eyes

like the rings of a tree –

these are the years they lived after

in whatever approximates peace:

that which runs parallel to perfection,

equivalent but untouching.

Poet’s statement:

Written in the first person to illuminate the speaker’s authority on their experience of the poem’s content, I hope this piece can prove valuable in providing one perspective from a person in treatment on the potentially transformative nature of psychiatric care.

Declarations

Disclosures

The author states that there is no conflict of interest.