Godly Hospital

—Composed while admitted as a patient
at CMC-Randolph psychiatric hospital

Seasonal missalettes lay stacked on an end table
in a Charlotte mental hospital at four a.m. I have slept
all I can once again. The dream was deep, my own voice
singing solemnly “in a Ford SUV” as I chased women

in the silly ways of days past. I walked alone,
as I awoke, my money squandered, the lovely Asian

brunette long since faded from my arm
and into the crowd of a Manhattan street corner.
This was the facsimile of a life absent
willpower chasing the trappings

of fame out in the streets. I didn’t sleep;
I crashed into dreams from night to night,

the perfect folds of the sheets barely undone,
my bedroom a mausoleum to the greatness
I’d become. With a T-shirt, a button-down,
and a pair of shorts as all I own,

I’m still widely known as a younger poet.
The blue of my outfit reminds me of home,

of the Great Lakes around Michigan like negative
space around the artwork of a simple mitten
in the Museum of Modern Art perhaps?
The script has been rewritten, my body no longer

the landscape of desire on a New York street,
the skyscrapers threatening to tumble over.

My body is the clean world reasserting itself
within me, my thoughts like noncorporeal angels
sprinkled stunningly before the hyper-violet sunrise
for a day where I will work to pay it forward—

all I’ve learned here in Charlotte, most glorious
among the cities of my heart. No, I won’t die for art.

Sunsets no longer meaning what they used to,
as I await six a.m. and the opening of the group room
with the blessing of wandering the ward among people—
real people who can be as sweet or, as yet, incomplete as me.

Anthony Butts is the author of Little Low Heaven (New Issues 2003), Winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2004 William Carlos William’s Award for best book. He is also the nephew of Florence Ballard—former member of the Supremes singing group before her suicide in 1976. Butts continues to overcome the maladies of schizophrenia, Asperger’s syndrome and issues with anxiety. Dr. Butts has a PhD from the University of Missouri in poetry writing and is a native Detroiter currently residing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana–where he is a patient in a six month partial hospitalization program for mental health and substance abuse recovery.

Photo “Cool Gent” by Bryant L. Jones