Craiglockhart (Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous)

When I kicked over the wheelchair
I couldn’t do the simplest task,
except the epileptic flailing
of my military antimasque.
Turning on the hissing gas-lamp
had me reaching for the mask.
You opened up my mind
and you didn’t even ask.

Sh-sh-sh shut the fuck up,
I think I’m going insane,
I’ve got all these bombs
going off in my brain.
I’m like a rabid dog
at the end of it’s chain
and they say they’re gonna send me
back to the front again.

I’m like a marionette
with twisted strings,
my limbs are jack-knifing
and my inner ear sings
of the pain of war
and other perverse things.
I can’t find the gentle peace
that a hospital usually brings.

No matter how obedient
your soldiers of war,
If enough shells reign down
they will be shaken to the core,
until there comes a time
when they can’t take anymore
and their mind shuts down
behind a glazed, closed door.

You think it might be shock waves,
or poison from the shells
that’s making me withdraw
into this epileptic hell
and sometimes you shrug your shoulders
and say “we just can’t tell,
maybe it’s his lack of moral fibre
that’s making him unwell”.

Your treatments are barbaric,
Explain, Persuade, Suggest
that baths, massage, electricity
are really for the best,
when all my mind and body needs
Is an aching, morbid rest,
and not to feel like a rat
in a cataclysmic test.

So you put me in this chapel
and you sit me in this chair
and you give me books to read
and feign a sense of care -
but one day I will walk from here
and people will not stare
at the dancing crazy fucker.
The Craiglockhart nightmare.

Inspired By: photograph by Richard Nixon (c) Rich Pictures

https://www.facebook.com/richpicturesphotography