Charlene Stegman Moskal
Crazy
I have been watching people
who used to be somebody.
They carry their delusions
as a ghost passes through walls
to rooms filled with cracked mirrors
beckoning them to take a tumble
down the rabbit hole,
skin the veneer of sanity
until raw and oozing
it scabs over
and normalcy is a scar.
See the woman dressed for the apocalypse
who carries her world in a garbage bag,
coos and sings lullabies to the lost child,
fiercely protects the bits and pieces
of soda cans, wool blankets, wire hangers
and her right to be the disease and the salvation
See the man who sees strangers approach
with machetes, baseball bats, M16s,
who flails and curses at syringes
loaded with anesthesia to remove
the only friends he can confide in,
who understand him with cryptic gestures.
See the one whose sex has been obliterated
replaced by lice, rotted teeth, matted hair,
pants soiled under the buttocks,
booze-sour breath and swollen limbs
that leave behind open wounds
dripping like the gash in Jesus’ side.
They bring their world into mine.
I invent simple fixes;
turn empty megastores
to house them,
delouse them with showers,
give them clean clothes,
beds to sleep on,
psychotropic drugs to soothe them.
I sit in my car watching
through rolled up windows
like those who sit in glass walled spaces;
their paper plans tattered at the edges
far from the tents and shopping carts,
away from the reek of the unwashed,
the abandoned who sit shaking
with blankets over their heads,
But my assumptions about their needs
may be outweighed by their wants.
Perhaps in some metaphysical shift
they are in my illusion to remind me
how tenuous is my reality
when I seek logical answers
in a world gone crazy.
Charlene Stegman Moskal is the author of One Bare Foot (Zeitgeist Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The Esthetic Apostle, Multibilis, Dash, Chaleur Journal, Helen, Sky Island Journal, The Raven’s Perch, Exposition Review, and other journals. She is a teaching artist with The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project and a fellow of the New Jersey Writing Project. For three decades prior to moving to Las Vegas, she taught in public schools in South Texas.
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