Olive View Neuropsychiatric, LA County, 2004

For Deborah R.

Deborah R. had a purple heart.

It was not without slim perforations

It was not notarized

Then filed, by some outsourced agency, based in D.C.

The mauve-ish mitral valves were shrouded

In the penny-loafer mores of Yankee-suburbia.

She looked intact-like the sterile business of bar graphs

Or the simple chemistry, of acrylic powder

As it converges with those chintzy water bowls,

At the local $30 mani-pedi.

(When Deborah kicked the Vicodin, she became agoraphobic.

Her seventy-or-so-mother got her to the grocery store

Once/monthly.)

Sometimes it was easy--

And sometimes milk was spilt, unbraiding

Freezer-aisles

Like a mutant naval brigade--then splintering off

into slender renegade lakes--

(A sad exhibition of lucency in a liquid vein-mop).

After the seventy-two hours elapsed,

I never saw Deborah again.

But on nights such as this (where

Lurid constellations convene and then diverge again

Into

An astral spasm of insurgent configurations...

Going nowhere.)
I wonder if I will be remembered for my feats

And forgotten as I am,

Starboard from one, to the next confine.

SCHLAG