Insane

clinical fact

not word

you and the white coated girl said

on my birthday

when you gave me the watch

that marked my madhouse minutes

 

surgical silver surrounded

a nervous wrist tick

covering cuts, not wounds

my mental giblets bulging

at each twenty five hour

tock throb of a locked ward day

punctuated only by the medicine cart

and its punctual pill push

 

escape came, long wrists later

to another place, with an unlocked door

but no way out

 

I took your timepiece

and hung it from the ceiling

thinking maybe it was time I joined it

 

but never did

 

ripping it triumphantly from the artex

on my final day there

dried out and free, I clocked out

without you

and went to Paris

where, hunched on a bridge

round the back of Notre Dame

I launched your watch into the river

 

dark droplets pitched back

as ripples pulsed along

a dying wave

 

below the surface

a stopped face dulls

and second hand

tremors tremble unseen

deeply

in Seine