Arts and Crafts at the Psych Ward

The colored pencils are pointless to use
because they’re pointless,
part of protocol for us, the beltless bunch,
so the pencils stay long and the crayons
get used to the knuckle.
They cut out many craft options because scissors
are off the table.
The uncovered clay gets dry and unusable
unless you smash it with all you got.
And some do
with all they got left.
But most of what’s inside us
doesn’t come out during art therapy.
Dark and gray colors are rarely used.
No snapped brushes, no furious scribbling,
the watercolors don’t come from crying
over spilled paint.
We don’t lose our minds
if the tremors make us color outside the lines.
We don’t turn paintings into papier-mâché
from tearing it up in a fit of rage.
It is a reprieve
from the overflowing conveyor belt of anxious thought
or the agitated catatonia sitting like a frozen wasp
or the tension of everyone
sleepwalking with restless leg syndrome,
emotional but medicated into drowsy volcanoes.
In art therapy
sometimes what’s inside us does come out
and it’s beautiful.
Sometimes the clay is smashed
so that with careful hands
it can become
a sculpture of hope.

Panic Attack Protocol

You pull your hair hard, elbows like antlers.
You gasp through your teeth,
sternum stretching upward like a balloon
being buried alive.
Your lungs are filling with hummingbirds and heat.
Your heart is a running boat propeller
that has been pulled naked from the water.
You are on a carousel and can’t stop.
You are suffocating on the air you’re drowning in.
Breathe in. Through your nose.
Let that chilly wisp crawl through
and caress the back of your tongue.
Let your chest fill like a fire hose
being woken up by water.
Breathe out. Through your mouth.
Drop your jaw like a drawbridge.
Release that train of fog through the tunnel of your lips.
Breathe in. This has happened before. You have done this before.
Breathe out. You will make it. You always do.

Medicine Ball

When I hate myself I reach into photo albums
and pull the child version of me into the present.
I make myself look at that boy
and say the awful things I have said
to the mirror in my mind.
The condemnations rush away
like the refugee raindrops that scatter
on windshields pushing towards the horizon.
I will not punish that child for the sins of his
future.
Then I try to shove the truth
down my throat.
The truth
that I am that child.
The gag reflex of judgment punches back
with an uppercut of expectations.
It is a medicine ball rising in my windpipe,
being pulled by the first shoelaces I ever tied myself,
covered in scars from lessons I never learned.
It doesn’t want me to swallow the recognition
that the mistakes I make as a man
come from the same reasons
for the mistakes I made as a child
and I would never berate the child
the way I do the man.
I will suffocate on self-flagellation.
I will choke to death if I believe I am better
than that boy.
I will run out of breath
believing that they are
two different people.

David Icenogle is a writer and mental health advocate from the Midwest. He has written non-fiction work for the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, as well as poetry for Asylum Magazine, A Tether to this World, Main Street Rag, Rising Phoenix Review, From
Whispers and Roars, and others.