each with a specific desire

The play with time was so uncanny…an alien time seemed to dawn.
--schizophrenic patient



Throughout the ward, patients, each with a specific desire, talked incessantly of freedom; some from the physical constraints of their captivity, some merely from the shackles of thought. Suffering, yes, of course, but madness itself is an escape, and if not a dismissal from their institutionalization, then at least the satirical fantasies of the morbid dream bends the world, shaking away the empty cobwebs so adherent to the passersby, worshiping their logic, denying the pain of understanding those hidden from the world inside box cars racing through tunnels, discovering that there is more to this existence than the pounding pressures of modernity.
These men and women speak in foreign tongues now, disguised in atypical methods of dissembling the puzzle pieces, breaking the picture, holding the gold; they wait, in verbose chatter while the nurse makes her rounds, delivering the chemicals to straighten them out, to put the world back in perspective, to see the falsehood transparency overlying the truth of insanity.
Psychosis, a dream in which they could not wake up, and feel the cycling of the sun piercing the sounds of lucidity, an insomnia of the soul. The plague of consciousness pulling downward on their brains, wanting so badly to reach out and place God in light of their suffering, but they simply laughed in hysteria at the distortions of their senses.