This poem, my 2nd hybridanelle, reflects on what it was like for me to be “inhumed” at the Camarillo State Hospital between 13 and 14. There I spent a year on the children’s unit, a locked ward with cinder block walls and heavily grated windows.
The title is meant to convey the sense of being killed in spirit, mind, and soul as well as the sense of being entombed (inhumed), alive only physically. I also wanted it to hint at the sense of being dehumanized (inhume—inhuman—dehumanize—inhumation), though this is not a denotive definition for the word. The scheme of indentation is meant to mimic the way a column of bricks is organized in a cinder block wall.
Inhumation
locked wards cower in the distant gloom;
grated windows pattern all my dreams;
heavy haze distorts my heavy mood.
my eyes are weary of watching faded lights;
i wait throughout the dismal night to hear
the call of a rooster just beyond my sight.
silence is an ever-present drone;
tempered springs betray my slightest move;
grated windows pattern all my dreams.
these cinderblocks enfold my spirit in lime;
interred in tomblike walls of concrete halls,
my eyes are weary of watching faded lights.
thoughts amid this broken darkness brood;
restless motions lurk within the shade;
tempered springs betray my slightest move.
this is the crypt where my rotting soul is set,
thus laid to rest beyond that twilight hail,
the call of a rooster just beyond my sight.
time is fractured into mental shards,
strewn against the darkness of my view;
restless motions lurk within the shade.
and the images betray my heart with lies
that flash against my mind as crumbled hopes;
my eyes are weary of watching faded lights.
here i watch them phase in empty hues,
omens of a future laid in brick
strewn against the darkness of my view.
this lucid static is comfort of a sort
that’s lost with every sunrise when i hear
the call of a rooster just beyond my sight.
black within the slowly rising brume,
locked wards cower in the distant gloom,
omens of a future laid in brick;
heavy haze distorts my heavy mood.
i dread the sound that will end another night,
a sound that seals my fate within this hell—
my eyes are weary of watching faded lights—
the call of a rooster just beyond my sight.
Publication History:
The Awakenings Review — Summer 2007
