No Easy Path

I climb the chipped steps,
past the drab grey walls,
smell the institutional smell,
turn left at the psych ward.

The nurses size me up;
I am found wanting,
a mother whose child has
broken down.

I wait in the social lounge
where people with agonized eyes
walk through their
tortured inner landscapes,
fragile and haunted as trembling ghosts,
the floor turned unsteady under their feet.
It feels like the abandoned ones live here,
that the rain never stops
sliding down the windows
above the busy city streets,
where the rest of the world
lives on.

Where will my son's bright spirit
ever find a place to land,
in halls so bleak and bare,
the hours measured out by naps
and pills in little paper cups?

He approaches, tousle-headed,
the same blue eyes.
We hug,
the same big smile.
I am relieved.
This is still my son.

I am about to make a long journey
with this blue-eyed lad.
We begin a conversation
that will last the years.

By the time I descend
the grey chipped steps, emerging into
the parallel reality called Normal Life,
I have learned that,
in a nanosecond, any one of us
can topple over into that land of
rain-speckled windows
and no more hope.

My son, brilliant, gifted,
a mystic, a dreamer,
a composer, a lover of life,
had walked the fine line
between daybreak and hellfire
and had fallen.

Schizophrenia had claimed
my bright-hearted boy
for its own at seventeen.

He had moved into another life,
as lonely as a coyote
howling at the moon.
I hold on tight, for all the years to come,
tethering him to earth
with the force of my will.
I will never let go.

We find the gifts
that accompany the pain.
We learn things we would
never have learned any other way.
But the price is high.
Slowly, as the decades turn,
the boy grows to a man
in institutional walls.
Hope fades to resignation.
The golden spark grows dim.
My boy became a man;
no easy path for him.


for Kerry's prompt at Real Toads: The Mind. I am adding one of Jeff's songs. He has composed many beautiful ones, and written some amazing poems, but this one speaks to me in response to the above poem.


I Fly Through a River of Dreams
by Jeffrey Siddhartha Crazy Horse Marr


I was a child but I have grown
Your quiet house is all I've known
The crooked peach-tree in the yard
The killing rain we took too hard

And now I must cry
And embrace you
And wave good-bye...

I Fly Through a River of Dreams
Where love is like a summer breeze
I Fly Through a River of Dreams
That carries me toward the Sea

I see you on the bright-green bank
You are the one that I must thank
I see your face and sky-blue dress
Come, let us touch our last caress

And now I must cry
And embrace you
And wave good-bye...

We'll meet again just you and I
Beneath a peach-tree in the yard
The two of us will never die
And rain becomes a little sigh

And now I must cry
And embrace you
And say good-bye...