Neuroleptics
There goes the man with the paper face
stretching his arms for takeoff,
his cloak flapping open for flight.
He knows every twig in these wooded grounds.
He can float above every tree.
Above him red squirrels chase each other across chestnut branches.
He removes his top, puts his hands thumb to thumb
and watches through the rhombus he’s made
as he reprograms the laundry van
rumbling past the old asylum gates.
Samuel is many people: today he is one or other of the Wright Brothers;
sometimes he’s a footman of Cosimo de Medici;
often a misunderstood zoologist;
occasionally, however, a retired baker, the breadcrumb course of his life
eaten up by pigeons and neuroleptics.
He is prodromal to florid on this rain-smacked, sandstone, churched campus
where I sit on a bench on my final day of nurse training
trying to remember the difference
between risperidone and aripiprazole.
Andy Murray is a retired psychiatric nurse whose poems have been published in a number of outlets, including Dreich, The Poets’ Republic, Southlight, Stanza, Prole, Poemsforall Miniatures (San Diego). His first pamphlet is due out in the Autumn.