Bleak Psychosis

They had kept her in a padded cell

Since she tried to slash her wrists,

Throwing herself against the walls

In what were psychotic fits,

‘She’s genuinely paranoid,

The outlook’s not so bright,

We thought that she might come out of it

If we kept her overnight.’

 

She’d been in there for a week or more

And there wasn’t any change,

‘If we put her into a coma, we

Could rearrange her brain.

She said that her name is Alice,

Can’t remember her address,

We found her down on the river bank,

In a blood-stained party dress.’

 

We’d just perfected a way to probe

The thoughts in another’s mind,

I wanted to try it out on her

And the doctors murmured ‘fine!’

We placed her into the helmet that

Would analyse her brain,

While I hooked in to another feed

That would read her, just the same.

 

I found us both on a river bank

In the shade of a willow tree,

Beside us there was a rabbit hole

As large as it could be,

Alice reached and she grabbed my hand

And we dived into the hole,

She said, ‘You’re going to see horrors

That will terrify your soul!’

 

We landed down in a garden, saw

A man in a stovepipe hat,

Sitting and drinking cups of tea

With a grinning Cheshire cat,

She took a sip and we shrank on down

With the table up so high,

The grass was looming above our heads

And reaching up to the sky.

 

But on the ground was an ‘Eat Me’ cake,

And Alice took a bite,

We suddenly zoomed on up to the roof,

That was almost twice my height.

Alice was crying a flood of tears

And she said, ‘It gets much worse!

Wait ‘til we eat the mushrooms here,

You’ll think that we’ve both been cursed.’

 

Half of the mushroom said ‘To Grow’,

And the other half ‘To Shrink.’

She nibbled on one, before she gave me

A chance to even think,

It dropped us into a raging flood

And we swam to meet our fears,

As all the animals floated past

In a river of Alice’s tears.

 

They could have been magic mushrooms, or

It could have been cake with hash,

For Alice’s mind was full of things

That came and went in a flash,

A caterpillar appeared just then

A hookah in its mouth,

A rabbit, dressed in a waistcoat, checked

Its watch, went travelling south.

 

I didn’t know what to do by then

For Alice was falling apart,

We found ourselves in a courtroom

With the King and the Queen of Hearts,

The Queen was screaming at Alice that

She might as well be dead,

While Alice told her to stuff it, and

The Queen said, ‘Off with her head!’

 

I’d seen enough and I ripped it off

And I shut the system down,

Alice sat in a daze with all

The doctors gathering round,

‘I think that Alice has gone too far,

Her brain has turned to fluff,

I tell you - what she has going on,

You couldn’t write the stuff!’

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[Veronica Chandler]

This piece brings up so many thoughts for this reader, and strangely enough the very first thought is, "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant" a song by Arlo Guthrie. Strange things happen when you eat mushrooms, and special cakes. The flow and rhyme and everything about this poem is so good, I wonder what this reader can add to it by review other than to keep you writing. For selfishly I want to keep on reading.

[Dr. Wood ?]

pretty cool David..A great idea carried out with great skill

[quinfinn]

ah yes, perhaps not the doctors but....lewis carroll had no issue with the fantasy world of alice's brain. you have done it again David, positively a brilliant write! very entertaining!