I spoke to my trauma

      It dug its grave into my chest

             It refuses to come back to life

                    no matter how many times I summon it

 

The first words you say to a cop when you are being arrested should never be “Fuck you.”

I'm in a bare room. Nobody here but Poe. Lights flicker on off on off on off. Poe laughs at me but he's strange now, wearing a badge and carrying a billy club in his belt. Oh, it's not Poe; it's the cop. Oh shit, I've been arrested.

The cop is laughing at me, shoving me. He puts his face right up next to me and moves his lips, but all I can hear is a bullwhip cracking.

Sideways. Everything. Oh, God, the cop has knocked me down. My head is right next to a gray circle. It's a drain in the middle of the floor. I can smell it. There's blood and sweat rising up out of its putrid depths and coming into my nose and mouth. My back! The cop is kneeling on me. He's got his knee on my back, forced into my kidney. My God it hurts, and "I can't breathe." "Good," he says, “This is what happens when you don’t listen." I'm sorry, I say, but it comes out like it did before: "Fuck you." But I am sorry, and I can't breathe. "Let me go, I can't breathe." But I have no air to speak, maybe I'm just thinking it. I'm about to pass out. Now there's another weight, another knee, another cop with his knee on the side of my head. My head can't hurt this much, and I can't breathe. My God, it hurts, and I can't breathe.

Later—was it only five minutes?—all I could hear was the cacophonous ringing of AC/DC's "Back in Black." I sat in that padded room for a century, or it seemed that way. Fear was gone. Anger had taken its place. I had to use the bathroom, but there wasn't one, so the stench of the drain became even more unbearable. Eventually, the same cops who had beaten on me handed me a chicken sandwich, which I could hardly tell was chicken because of what I had just done to the drain, but I ate it. They handed me clothing, an orange t-shirt, and brown pants with a drawstring at the waist, and I noticed I was naked, but I refused to get dressed. Sometime later, I fell asleep clutching the fabric.

Four or five days later, or so I was told, I was released from jail to a behavioral health unit. It was nighttime. I could tell because it was dark outside and the air was cool against my feverish skin. When we entered the facility, two orderlies in clean white jumpsuits greeted me. I didn't know what was happening but suddenly, faced with men who smiled, I felt full of hope. "Can I go home now?" I asked. And when there was no answer, "Can I? Can I go home?" 

Instead, I was given pills, little white ones. Then I was dressed in blue scrubs with “Property of Shady Village Hospital” printed on the back and was put in another padded cell.

Under the influence of the medicine, I realized that behind the brown steel door, the walls of my cell were not just beige; they were pearl-white. They glimmered and undulated and shot sparks. Heaven-esque lights shone down on me.

At that exact moment in time, I realized it. I was insane.

Right next to the door, there was something I didn't want to see: a splotch of blood. I got as far away from it as I could, but now I could hear someone screaming. Somebody in the room next to me was suffering. He sounded terribly wounded, like a specter you might hear on Halloween or the victim of an awful traffic accident. Each time he screamed, the blood got darker, more dangerous, and then the screams seemed to be coming from my own insides, from underneath my skin, as if somehow this blood knew what I was thinking, could see the guttural, primal heart within me. I stared at the splotch of blood, and fire came out of my eyes. The screams made the blood even thicker, brighter, a river of crimson on the floor. The river rolled over me, and suddenly I was gasping for air, drowning in blood. I couldn't breathe. And then I awoke.

I wasn't drowning. There was no river of blood. But it wasn't much better than the dream. The man was still screaming, and Poe, my phantom, was there to haunt me again. I shivered and closed my eyes. The lights flickered on off on off. Finally, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, the screaming next door had stopped. I realized I could think clearly for the first time in years. I sat up. My shirt was half off but thank God my pants were fully on. I put my ear up against the wall between me and the screamer but now heard only soft sobbing.

I had been given two medicines, Klonopin and Depakote. I would take them each day of the twenty-one days that I was in the behavioral unit. They did help a lot, but they didn't cure me. The world remained a cacophony burrowing itself into me, and I could not quiet the noise. Each night, I would see the magazines on the table 20 feet away from my brown steel door. They were neat and orderly. I was uneven, jagged, unhinged.

I did have one triumph in the hospital, my first day on the ward. Along with the ward's 12 other patients, I was enjoying a meal of Hamburger Helper and mashed potatoes, the pasta a bit underdone and crunchy, when a man named Bob walked up to me and punched me in the arm.

I could have gone crazy on him. I could have come up with my always ready, "Fuck you." But instead, for the first time I could remember, I exercised some restraint. I thought about his motives, his madness, and I figured we were all under high stress due to being overcrowded in a psychiatric ward. And I just let it go.

There is something grandiose about peace, pacifism, and also something totally logical and sane.

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