Asylum Story
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This haunting happened while visiting a partially demolished Connecticut State Mental Hospital on the banks of the Pequot/Thames River, in Norwich. A dark day, with clouds of unsettled crows protesting my intrusive patriarchal presence..
On a rural Pequot River,
with steady New England flow
toward Long Island's warming Sound
Then on and out,
whispering drowned memories
of Atlantis
Slumbering on eastern bank,
surrounded by Native Elder spirit grounds,
ruined medicine's monolithic altars
worship insanely leviathan
brooding bruised monoliths
Stately asylums
crumbling carcasses
sagging with trembling memories
of disability
to remember sacred Mother's
co-empathic presence.
Naked Earth's noticing
of past still present
choices and voices
speaking through cracked windows
and abandoned door frames,
peeling exterior landscapes,
collapsed roofs
with rotten root foundations
Mumbly murmuring memories
of past river fogged-in days
and nights of terror
Ruled by despots of European sanity
secretly applauding
wildly appalling
bacchanal pleasure voices
jumping into swollen tides
for shrinking silent despair
Unsteady loss of health
and yet all wise-stately
reasonable flow of wealth
away diversely out
toward wild remembering presence
downstream
straining severed screams
of impolitic
unpolite
madness
Intending to grow up
a LeftBrain modern school
for massive insanity
Monoculturally invested dust
decaying these submerged prisons
of professional abuse
and dispassionate neglect,
oppressively irrational exculturation.
Wild voices dismembering
loving matriarchal presence
of naturally nurtured persons
Too entrapped by past terrors,
chronic, climatic, psychotic prisons
for muttering conversations
between Ego's anger voice
berating RightBrained voiceless fear
of trauma's relentlessly modern ambivalence
Quivering recrimination
reiterating throughout drugged dungeon nights
Historic monopolistic layers
of mindless medicinal attendance
drowning native rivers
of basic neural noticing,
thereby inducing rot
Deep dark tidal waters
briefly intuiting tender absence
of co-invested narrow neural paths
toward peak polypathic saturation
Hiding in a forest
of cracked and crumbling drives and walkways,
virally seductive toxic infestation,
depoliticized
unspoken disabling history
now weeding over.
On this denatured Pequot River
visitors violate gloom's ghostly despair,
turning our backs
to return to safer grounds
No less trespassing
HerStory's voiceless wilderness
rotting recklessly profane
Slinking down
a slickly overcrowded river
of ubiquitous fear investment
in tumble-down sad urbanity.
Copyright © Gerald Dillenbeck | Year Posted 2015
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