Doctor after doctor says
"How are you feeling?'
Watch schizophrenics go to the quiet room
Where they don't hear the voices
I shouldn't be here
I'm not that crazy
You try not to say out loud
Then again your mind
Becomes rational
For just a split second
And my mind goes
"You need to be here"
When you realize
You cut your emotions skin deep
Purge up all my sanity
And starve away all the names
I suddenly realize
That i belong here
In a mental ward
ED is silent he re
I like this place
He has no control over me
Here
Skin and bones
Hunger is a lovely feeling
Messed up i know
This is what i crave

A Poem in 3 Parts by Sara L Russell, 4/6/15; 00:51am*

I

There is a grey area between
this world and the next.
People can be foolish; they dabble in ouija, in
dowsing, in automatic writing;
and - wittingly or unwittingly,
they may open a portal
to the other side.
That is how they enter.
Beware of inviting them in.

Shadow people are there
where needle pierces skin; where the ******
sits, glassy-eyed, on the precipice of oblivion;
they lurk in unholy places where godless
politicians declare themselves to be
speaking for God;
they haunt the dreams of drunkards,
schizophrenics, junkies
and the paranoid.
But they are not spun out of dreams,
they are real.

Shadow people were there
when the ancient pharaohs of Egypt
were interred, with all their gold;
they took them to Hades
for also burying their wives
and servants, alive.
They were there
in **** concentration camps,
sitting on the left shoulders
of those who blindly carried out
orders of death and torture.

They subsist in underworlds of catacombs,
they lurk in the spaces between
our conscious and unconscious minds;
In blackened mirrors they seek out a vortex,
My friends, be the light that
keeps out the darkness,
Do not seek to question the dear and foregone,
No matter how much they are missed;
for there are others lurking in the shadows.
Be not the portal inviting them in.


II

Did I see you in Bohemian Grove,
smiling at the Cremation of the Care?
Were you there,
and did you have more than one shadow?

Did I see you in that Great Hall
with chequered floors,
where the Eye of Horus
watched over a pyramid of gold?

Did you lift a cup of
the good red wine,
did blood brothers drink each other's health,
gazing through a glass darkly?

Did we toast the Cremation of the Care,
and how many others were there?


III

Sometimes we visit Hell in our dreams,
though we may fervently pray before sleep.
There is no shame in sleeping with the light on.
Wear a cross, if you think that it will help.

Sometimes the citizens of Hell visit us,
in that stasis between sleep and wakefulnes;
they are only ever seen at the outer periphery of our vision.
It's never a good idea to look at them directly.

Sometimes they venture a little closer than the rules allow.
Sometimes the line between their domain and ours is blurred.
Occasionally, the breeze seems to whisper your name -
only, it's not the breeze.

Be vigilant.
Always try to see them first.

captured in the psych ward, fear of being kidnapped by demons




today ron got out of bed and went to the cafe for a morning coffee and spoke to them

about his latest patient, who was in the psych ward because he feared being kidnapped

by demons who are flying around his head, you see a few nights before he was admitted

to the psych ward, he tied himself up claiming the demons have him, and if he told people

about the demons, his next door neighbour will snarl at him with his coffee saying your not a cool

kid buddy and the reason why he told them there, because they won’t blab, and nobody outside

will know about the 21 year old paranoid schizophrenic he has in his psych ward, and ron left the

cafe and headed to the hdu to give the morning medications out and he gave it to patty roe, and

charlie chaplin and when he came to the 21 year old he stopped to have a little talk saying

how was your sleep last night and then he said my name is olly hammond, and i was being threatened

outside a nightclub in the city and that gave olly horrible kidnapping thoughts thinking he would be

kidnapped by them, but really they were roughing him up, but olly knew nothing of that, and the thugs said i might

kidnap olly in a minute and illy heard it, and ran off yelling, the demons have got me, the demons have got me

and ron was not really proud of the drug they chose for olly but gave him a dose of the drug for the morning

and then after handing all the medications out, he went to do research on his computer about trying to find

the right drug for olly, because this drug he was on was making olly feel nautious, and definitely made him

very paranoid, but the nurses didn’t share ron’s enthusiasm about putting him on another drug, because

sometimes it’s good to tackle the problem by digging the whole root rather than just the bush, and ron said

yeah i agree with that, but while he is on this medication he will be violent to himself or another patient or

even one of us, i know olly is only young but he can **** a man, because nobody really looked after him

much as a kid, and the nurses said ok, but really putting him on another medication could **** him by making

him very slow and ron said, yeah, but he thinks demons are kidnapping him, and if anyone makes fun of him

olly will become very violent toward himself or others, and then as ron was talking he noticed afexor, which

was made for depression, but as ron was reading it, it can help paranoid schizophrenics if they are monitored

properly and then 15 minutes before lunch, ron went to olly’s room to say, we are taking you off the drug your on

and putting you on afexor because it can get rid of the paranoyer in your head, and let’s put this bluntly, get rid of

these demons who are threatening to kidnap you, and olly asked when do i start this new medication and ron said, how about tonight

and because you have only been on medication for 4 days, we can’t see why we can’t not give you any more doses

of that medication, and ron left and then went in to deliver the lunches to everyone and patty roe and charlie chaplin

and olly and 12 more patients all came out, but olly started yelling because his meal looked like **** and tore strips off

charlie chaplin because he told him to shut up and ron took olly to his room to talk to him and then ron brought his

lunch in and olly used his hand to throw his lunch all over his room and ron gave olly a ****** to calm down and

then went back to his office to work on this affexor experiment and olly slept right through to dinner and he didn’t like that either

and ron said, olly, you must eat something or you’ll starve and then the nurses force fed a tube into his stomach, and olly

screamed saying ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* YA FUCKEN ****** and ron gave him his

first two tablets of affexor and it might have calmed him down, and as ron clocked off and bought fish and chips and

went home to retire on the couch, at 3 am, the nurses rang ron up saying the new medication is giving him a rash all over

his body, and this is making him very hard to settle down, and ron said, ok, try him on melleril, 3 tablets, tomorrow, and we’ll

scrap the affexor, and the nurses apologised for getting him up, and ron said, don’t worry about it, i want olly well as well

and the next morning ron went to his usual cafe for breakfast and then went to the HDU, to hand out the morning medications

and when ron came up to olly, he copped a serve saying, that medication you put me on gave a fucken rash, and then olly said

next time you think about a wonder drug, can you please think about the fucken side effects and ron gave him 1 tablet of melleril in the

morning and when it came to the nighttime medications he gave him 2 tablets of melleril, and so far so good, and after he gave the 9 o’clock supper

ron went home and heated up some soup and watched TV, and fell asleep on the couch, and the next day, melleril was a wonder drug

but it’s only early days, will this drug stop olly’s demon kidnapping, thinking everyone is going to bash or kidnap him when noone is after him.

The City lights blinked out forever--literally overnight--with a sudden finality that caught even the most nuclear-winter-prepared/Guns N Ammo reading/Campbell's canned soup and distilled-water stocked/backyard-fallout-shelter-owning-survivalists completely off guard. Armageddon had always been there, sleeping just beyond the horizon line of our periphery, but it awoke fully clothed and ready to go to work that day.
It was an ordinary Thursday, just like any other. The MUNI lines were choked as always with angry elderly women clutching plastic shopping bags full of pungent vegetables, poultry, and recyclables as if their lives depended upon the contents of those bags (maybe they did) and the usual gaggle of gibberish-mumbling crazies talking to themselves with cellphones plugged into their brains, some without. 
That day, baristas were 5 minutes, 23 seconds late for work on a city-wide average. Bartenders were making their rent in tips as rowdy soccer fans converged in their local Sunset, Richmond, Mission and SOMA district faux-Irish pubs to watch the latest big championship match between Ireland and...some other country.
By Saturday, less than two days later, the desperate siren-blare of emergency vehicles, the insect hum of DPT tri-bikes carrying cutthroat ninja-sneaky meter maids ready to make their weekly quotas by slipping bogus $55 parking tickets under the windshield-wiper of your best friend's beat-up, barely-working mid-90s Mazda you were borrowing just for the night, and the cloud-cutting rotary-whine of channel 5 news traffic-report helicopters chopping through the sky had been silenced forever.  
As if sensing the absence of gardeners, street sweepers and garbage men, weeds grew out of the cracks of the streets and sidewalks with the newfound urgency of a wildfire. Leaves swirled through glass and concrete skyscraper canyons, settled, and slowly began forming mounds as if attempting to fill the spaces that angry elderly women with plastic shopping bags, cellphone schizophrenics, and drunken soccer fanatics had once occupied.
Speculation about how the End of the World would actually occur had always been a theological reference point for religious zealots hell-bent on giving the Book of Revelations some validity, but had taken on a tone of comical absurdity in the hands of post-Y2K pop culture and disaster movies. A horde of zombies rising from their graves and feeding on the flesh of small bands of living human survivors was one of the more popular, albeit fantastic, apocalyptic theories. Some predicted that robots would enslave us, some thought aliens would invade us, while still others--baring signs reading "THE END DRAWTH NIGH," arms stretched meaninglessly up towards the hollow heavens in the sky above--believed biological or nuclear warfare to be the most likely form of humanity's demise.
But by the following Thursday, speculation had become a moot point; none of it had mattered at all in the end as the power-grid of the City, and then human civilization altogether, had been suddenly switched off for the last time by an alcoholic rent-a-god, leaving the face of the globe devoid of any trace of the spiderweb-night-glow of terrestrial city-lights. 
Only the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea were spared to fill the blank pages of history that were to follow human(kind's) fading footprints.

*

Aeons later...
When those birds learned to read, they would see cryptic symbols inside a crooked heart jaggedly carved into a tree trunk surrounded by a mote of fallen leaves and ragged newspaper pages blowing through the streets like tumbleweeds.
Aeons later...
Those tree-scratched symbols would form the sacred commandments of a secret new religion built upon the ashen, worm-eaten remains of two skeletons holding hands and a ****** trail of broken hearts trailing from their ribcages into the worm-mouths of babes.

the cold, white building has been abandoned for seven years today.
what was once a majestic foundation for the analysis of a humanity, now an empty fable of
gargantuan men in
laboratory suits
and young women who thirsted to follow in the footsteps of the
honorable Florence.

The sanguine fluids left from the yesterdays and the yesterdays seep and transude into the
holy grounds of the asylum.
no man, no beast dares to disturb the forsaken soil,
the venerable clay loam out of which grows the neverending carnage of body and flesh.
lost voices of a
thousand schizophrenics
still scream
from the silent operations of their euthanasia.

the lands have not lied under the unadulterated, pure heavens since the genesis of
H. sapiens himself. This “wise, knowing man” has
doused and suffocated
the flame that radiated prospect, leaving the wide, exquisite cosmos
no more than a nefarious expanse of chaos and dismay.

The structure, the edifice of what was intended for
knowledge and bounty,
has indeed fallen
victim
to the inauspicious prophecy that they molded and sculpted themselves.

Who is to define crazyness?
Or being mad?
Being sane? Insane?
Who?
Not you, not me, not anyone!
Would you like to know why?
Because my description of crazy or being mad or sane or insane is completely different to what your description is.
So when people call schizos crazy, it ****** me off.
Schizos are not crazy,
Maybe they just see things that are actually there.
You can call me crazy, call me mad, call me sane or call me insane.
Just think about it, maybe they see the things we cant see,
Because we could be the crazy ones who cant see what they see.

She is "The Monarch" of her own little world
Makeup applied and drowning in pearls
She walks down the halls of a house long abandoned
Regret stays beside her, her only companion
Memories play out like an opera before her
She went for the gold but ended up poorer
One foot is forced in front of the other
Each step an echo of lost sisters and brothers
To protect what matters a wall must be built
Brick upon brick, fear stacked with guilt
Exit the house, exit the dream
Enter a reality of conflicting schemes
Lucky for her she's loaded with downers
Schizophrenics grab both above and below counters
Trembling fingers clutch at the rim
Of a toilet containing this girl's ****** sin
She drowns her pain in colors of joy
Pinks, yellows, purples, to her mouth they deploy
These soldiers are saviors, without them she's dead
It's getting more common, the scream in her head
She tried to fight back but her will was too frail
The going got tough and everyone bailed
But what happens to the general that loses an army
"Perhaps ask the girl that's apparently self harming
For she is a veteran of wars never won
Invisible scars from invisible guns"
Call for a truce, wave the white flag
Nobody sees that the Queen's wearing rags
Somebody save her because God is long gone
She may not be breathing, flame extinguished come dawn
Her enemies draw near, they sense she's grown tired
Dragged not just through mud but also through briars
She can't ask for help with a lock on her lips
Ropes around ankles and chains around wrists
In a life filled with ultimatums, lies and distrust
Ashes are more than just ashes, dust more than just dust
The air becomes pain, each inhale near torture
Her Highness doesn't chase the things that can scorch her
So back into the dream, back into the house
Never the lion but always the mouse
Clean up the pearls and apply more concealer
Confirm the next order with the local drug dealer
A wilted rose with all its petals furled
I am "The Monarch," this is my world.

I'm going to run tonight.  
After the sun is down, the moon
has dipped into the starry sky's darkness
and the weekend fire pits are dancing with my shadow.
I'm going to breathe tonight,
deeply of the budding greens and mulching blacks
until my nostrils are painted with earth.  I'll let the sprinklers
drench every inch of my body until
I can flick the water from my hair
and all the world soaks through my chest
so my heart can beat against it.
I'm going to howl tonight,
from the very bottom of my breast with a smile on my face
legs never stopping to catch the air my lungs are surely missing
because tonight, the little boy, the lover, the beast—
tonight— they are the poet.