Self Harm/Power of Autonomy

Self Harm/Power of Autonomy 

Maybe what happens inside us maybe

what feels tragic exists in those vague rooms

those mute outskirts of shadow     not one

pathetic shred of prayer reaches us

                                                The Unknown Pain

                                                Stephen Berg

Afterward we had to sue for power

of attorney to take away your rights

to govern yourself.  Between the hospital

and the courthouse, maybe, what? five

miles?  a thousand?  The length

of an umbilical?  We rehearsed

words just in case, laid them in our laps

with copies of your charts detailing 

your traumas.

Officially it was a seizure induced by too

much tranquilizer.  Later on you’d proved

a loose cannon and you needed decisions

to be made for you now that you’d lost

control.  You weren’t there in your head
to fend

for yourself.  That was the day

you ripped off the intermittent pneumatic
compression devises to prevent DVT.

(deep vein thrombosis the nurse said)
They constricted and relaxed your calves

for you, after the emergency splenectomy.

(how hard were you kicked, how long

how many times?) but the worry

is oedema, is blood clots, Still, you

were lucid enough to rip them off

and had to be restrained.  It’s one of

the hundred proofs in your chart,

one of the death by a thousand cuts

that seem cruel and callus after what

was done to you.  And I wonder: 

when the judge opens the folder

will all of you fly out like pigeons in

the trenches, messages strapped to

their bony little legs?  Shit, I know it’s the wrong

metaphor but listen, I’m trying

without much success to say you were just

insane, that you’re sole self was

somewhere else, that somewhere beneath

the hematoma pill swill you just can’t reason

straight or be expected to behave

safely on your own and no I won’t

read them all I won’t read any of them

here, your traumas--it’s sick what they did

to you.  And listen, this next step, I know

seems the last blow to your thin dignity,

as though you’re naked again and on display.

Explaining it to you only makes you

lean away from any hope.  I don’t deserve

this you know is all you can say.  It’s only until

you’re well again I say.  But you’ll

never be well again.  I know as you try to roll

over and away and the Velcro restraints make

their little crinkle ripping but ultimately stay,

soft chains that they are, softer than

the judges voice giving you over to me

softer than the quiet of the house going down

into ashes (that’s one of the lines I wasn’t going

to read, about the fire three years earlier) softer than

when the nurse looks at your blacked out

face with the face of, well, I don’t know what,

not shock, something else, not dismissal,

not recognition, something like what I see

on his Honor’s face as he reads through you

and quietly closes your folder

giving your life, once more, into the hands

of strangers without ever bringing his gavel down.