Kim's prompt at Poets United's Verse First today is: Committed, a word with many meanings. I have written of this before, in prose, (The Prince of Compassion) and borrowed some of the phrases from that tale, so deeply etched in my mind is that journey with a loved one, and the words I wrote, later, to grapple with it.
Up the gray, chipped stairs,
past the gray drab walls,
gray rain drizzling down
the gray bleak windows,
the abandoned ones live here,
on their narrow beds of pain,
battling hopelessness,
looking for one small reason
to go on struggling.
And my son, thin, tall, tousle-haired, gentle,
mystic and dreamer, composer of music
and weaver of rhyme,
now lived in this landscape,
his hours marked out in paper cup pills,
naps and hospital trays.
He had walked the fine line
between daybreak and hellfire
and had fallen.
Where would his beauty
find a place to land
in halls so bleak and bare?
Up and down the halls they walk,
fragile as ghosts,
lonely souls making their solitary treks
through the labyrinths of their own minds,
land of rain-speckled windows,
tears and no more hope.
On the bare mattress,
he lies sleeping,
by his bed a note,
written in his jaggedy script:
I am Cloud.
Someone blow me away.
An electrical jolt
zaps my heart with fear.
Down the gray hall,
the gray, drab stairs,
out into the noisy brightness
of the city street,
that parallel reality called
Normal Life,
while behind me and two floors up
my son's life hangs
in the balance.
I am Cloud.
Someone blow me away.
