CK Tower
Still Swallowing The Cure
with apologies to Anne
I’ve come back to the place
of scattered senses. Come at midnight
during a January ice storm
without suitcase or security,
giving up my purse and jacket
for inspection, clutched in my hand
a book of Sexton's poems.
I sign by the inked-in X,
realize this is no game,
even insanity must stop a moment
for formalities.
Today mad voices creep into my room, curl
around my head, fog my mind
like the gray hazy cloud
that fills the dayroom,
when they allow us to smoke.
It’s always the same production:
paranoid hides in the corner,
clutches her pillow, addict
paces the halls, wrings hands.
Borderline smuggles a razor
inside her shoe. And there are
the permanent guests, whose pinched
blurred faces blend in
with the tasteless wall decorations.
Ten years I've slipped in and out of this place, where the doctors advertise
new drugs, and we paint ceramic flowers.
I might have sailed overseas, flown
to every exotic city, taken a lover,
had a child- a daughter.
But I’ve returned, recommitted,
and yet the craziness isn’t what is used to be.
I’ve lost the hang of it. The innocence of it.
My roommate in her so apropos insanity
black ensemble, her manic laughter
even she seems small and colorless.
Like my good trip pills,
from Dr. AllTogether.
The complimentary bon voyage
assortment pre-packaged
colorless persona. And I
keep swallowing the cure.
I have come back to hang
on the wall like a crooked picture.
To be decommissioned
like an obsolete steamer. Locked up
like a multiple offender
who was so hard up
she fell in love with prison.
Graduating To Wet Stones
I will be twenty-six in July. But you,
barely twenty-one, will still be young
for another year or two. We sit and watch
water stroking sand a restless petting:
Small stones tossed from their ocean boudoir
ride foam, nestle in irregular piles, lie still
and washed.
I recall the last time you were here and I
was not. No summer thrills but plenty of shock;
they politely call it therapy. I could almost smell
the brine on the cardboard scenery you’d sent
me. When they said I might never share the Pacific
with you again I, being a shade more stubborn
than weak, pushed back the death dreams.
I can tell you what they will never know-- how the mind
can cling to a single possibility, one liquid image
lifting and carrying you through a season of typhoon
chemistry. The cures, the drugs every book-smart
psychiatrists plan to straighten crooked psyches,
none make a moment so clear as these wet, simple stones
freeing themselves.
CK Tower resides in Lansing, Michigan and attends Michigan State University, where she is continuing her studies in creative writing and literature. CK is very involved in the internet literary scene, as editor for Conspire Poetry Journal, and poetry editor for Recursive Angel. CK is continually working to provide useful, top-quality resources, to assist readers and artists in their literary pursuits. Some of the journals where her work as appeared include: CrossConnect, The Allegheny Review, The Mississippi Review, Zuzu's Petals, The Morpo Review, Poetry Cafe, and The Astro Pages.