A little journey I went on in 1999/2000

Water resistant to a depth

of 1000 tears

Insane

clinical fact

not word

you and the white coated girl said

on my birthday

when you gave me the watch

that marked my madhouse minutes

surgical silver surrounded

a nervous wrist tick

covering cuts, not wounds

my mental giblets bulging

at each twenty five hour

tock throb of a locked ward day

punctuated only by the medicine cart

and its punctual pill push

escape came, long wrists later

to another place, with an unlocked door

but no way out

I took your timepiece

and hung it from the ceiling

thinking maybe it was time I joined it

but never did

ripping it triumphantly from the artex

on my final day there

dried out and free, I clocked out

without you

and went to Paris

where, hunched on a bridge

round the back of Notre Dame

I launched your watch into the river

dark droplets pitched back

as ripples pulsed along

a dying wave

below the surface

a stopped surface dulls

and second hand

tremors tremble unseen

deeply

in Seine