Songs for a Mad Woman

William Miller

The police car pulled up and then I was 

in hand cuffs, in disbelief, driven with two vagrants.

But I protested, cursed, screamed—“Don’t you know 

who I am?”  For those words, not all the ones

I published for thirty years, the books and magazines

that burned in the apartment fire, I was taken

to a place Kafka never dreamed worse.  A psych ward,

a treatment center where you were kept

without a phone call, a release date. 

A girl was raped in there, not by an inmate but two

attendants who took their pick from the gurney

they wheeled in daily, hourly.  An Aryan with 

a swastika tattooed across his back told me 

to stay quiet, play the game, nod and smile.

In the dayroom, the damned colored in coloring books.

For an hour, we sat in the shade of a wall topped

with concertina wire.  A woman with long silver hair

conjured birds with tiny wing-like hands—an old “traiteur”,

someone told me.  There was another woman,

“Gwen,” lost in her own shadows, eyes like

burned-out fuses. I needed a purpose and spoke

to her, made faces, sang songs she might know.

Her eyes lit up at “Yesterday”.  And then she said:

“I see many soldiers”.  The light in her eyes

went out and never came back.  I hoped she was

in a better place, soldiers all around, where someone 

tried to sing to her, at least knew her name.