Mental Health Act – poems

Reconstructed on your living room floor,

of upturned buckets, wooden planks, tin cans,

the plastic cover of a pornographic DVD:

‘This is the Temple of Solomon,’ you said.

Hair and beard grown wild as a prophet's –

entangled and matted as your thoughts –

an Elijah or John the Baptist, misunderstood,

intoning messages from God.

No diet of locusts and wild honey here –

only Pot Noodle on a broken stove,

in this, the wilderness you once called home.

The windows and furniture all now smashed –

the only things which had been left intact

from the whispered sorrows of your life:

the faithless wife, redundant job,

the stillborn child.

We sent you off, on Section 3, in a discreet grey van,

clutching your Bible in the cold, indifferent dawn,

to fill you up with olanzapine or clozapine until

you stop

dreaming of Jerusalem.

.

© Elizabeth Napier, reproduced with permission