Lab Rats

Others have spent a season in Hell, but I’ve been living in it for years. 

I dwell within the depths,

I mingle with the madmen,

I play the bongos in the drum circle of the damned.

Orderlies let us put on tattered clothes and shed our hospital sheets. Sheets which resemble togas but we were never people of high-standing in some theater of democracy – we are loonies, the town crazies, the pariahs with no messiah.

We pace around hospital rooms, walking from wall-to-wall waiting for someone to stop us.

No stimuli.

Nurses feed us chalk in a cup. We choke it down so we can maybe one day chat with the outside world again. At least that’s what everyone wants from us.

But we are the bastard children of bureaucracy and we would renounce our family name if we had one.

We are kept in an antipsychotic amniotic sac – alive but subdued.

We dance in front of royalty reluctantly. We entertain as court jesters but speak in jargon after our shift is over. We are subjects of no one. We are not loyal to any liege or lawmaker.

We are Prozac prostitutes pimped out by PhD’s, but we still prevail.

With side effects as our sidekicks, we still prevail.

With stigma as our soulmates, we still prevail.

The last generation of us were lobotomized and electro-shocked; cut up and microwaved.

No community solutions so we are treated as expendable. Discarded and left to rot.

We’re overpoliced and underfunded.

We tell people we are drowning and they tell us to grow gills

They impregnate us with sleeping pills and

the side effects of these sedatives make us quite ill with

nausea, dizziness, fever, chills and

blood-red pharmaceutical companies sniff green dollar bills and

we tell them that we’re finished, that we’ve had our fill but

they say they’re going to keep us for observation because

we’re a danger to ourselves and others still.

Mental anguish. Physical prison. This is the psych ward.

Patients and people from the outside world – who needs protection from who?

Trevor Wing is a writer from North County San Diego.