Today’s choice
Previous poems
William Manning for Mental Health Awareness Week
Living Flashback
My room is infested with bedbugs
I’m covered in bites, not love bites
I have to spend the night on the low secure unit
That I’ve only just been discharged from.
The paranoid nurse who signs me in thinks I’ve been tricked
And that they’ll never let me leave
Strange, aggressive characters roam the halls
One spells out the word MURDER backwards and forwards aloud
Over and over.
I tell the people I know
That I’ve been recalled for getting pissed
Doesn’t hurt to try to fit in
The charge nurse makes me endless coffee
I’m not allowed my laptop, so am on
Pen and paper. This place isn’t how I remember it.
The smell of urine is very strong here.
All the bins are overflowing and some
Have been pissed in
Bogies decorate the walls alongside
Pictures of bridges done in the Art Therapy group.
The guy who spells MURDER keeps asking me to
Come and watch late night TV with him, alone in the lounge.
He comes knocking at my locked door a few times. In the end, I yell
FUCK OFF! really loudly and he scarpers
I’m given a chicken and bacon baguette
It tastes like a really nice chicken and bacon baguette would taste
If you smoked 40 a day.
The charge gives me leftover ASDA yoghurts from the staff fridge.
At 730AM I bang on the office door
‘Someone let me out of this hellhole!’
They sympathetically let me out and I go back to the shared house
Where I’ve never noticed the ivy growing over the porch;
Its the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,
I run my hands over it
I haven’t brushed my teeth in 24 hours
I’m dying for a cigarette.
I have to go back tonight.
William Manning is a long term psychiatric patient who was originally educated in Oxford. He writes about mental hospitals and being transgender, and has recently gained Distinction in a Creative Writing MA. Insta @williammanning119
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