Four Years Ago in a Watched Chair in a Locked and Lamplit, Windowless Room All Night and into Invisible Morning

Take the implement too soft

And flexible they give you,

The only thing they give you,

Because anything too sharp

Or sturdy’s potentially

Dangerous to your soft flesh,

Because you are here because

You have tried to end yourself.

You might try to hurt yourself.

There’s nothing here to tempt you.

You can have water and light,

A blanket with your armchair,

But no communication

With any world but this room,

No distractions for tonight.

So you write. Page after page

Of cheap, lined paper filling

With your scrawls in blue ballpoint.

They encourage you to write,

Thinking that, unlike reading,

Or conversing with confreres,

Or obsessively screening—

To say nothing of drinking,

Pill-popping, playing with fire—

Writing is therapeutic.

That’s as may be, but if true,

You’ve long been deep in the throes

Of therapeutic illness.

You are calm in the lamplight,

Still, uncomplaining patient.

They have given you the tool

Of your transfiguration,

Destruction, and salvation.

You write like you breathe and breathe

Softly as you write all night,

Clutching your midnight disease.

Years later, you will read these

And smile to yourself alone.

How to last? Weave. Unweave. Weave.