Inspired by the poem 'The Lost Son' by TR

The Lost Girl

I.

No one can do anything,
and if they could,
they wouldn't know what to do.
The signs are there: exhaustion, apathy,
so says the news,
and the pieces they're doing on suicide.
Kids these days
are offing themselves at a high rate.
It's what happens in college.
All these college kids--
the parents withdraw the student,
and send them through the rehabs.

II.

She'll find herself
with parents hovering above her
in a small hospital room
like a room
with only a strip of carpet to walk on.
Hopefully.

III.

Four white walls.
She's given up her will.
No medication.
No clothes, shoes, books, or music.
No parents, friends, or money.
No phone, purse, or cell phone.

Just her: socks and a nightgown.

This is the baptism,
the psychiatry ward
is a baptism without water,
and it's attendants
are angels or demons, only human
on a good or bad day.

With horror, she'll sleep it off,
but awake with nowhere to go,

and she wakes, closed off,
windows barred,
with only a tiny skylight to look out of.

There is no transition,
like streams of water running through gravel parking lots,
with geese, who've forgotten to fly south,
aimlessly floating
under a blood red sky,
and bare, wrangled, and paralyzed trees...

IV.

Soundless,
she is in a different time zone.
She's never been here.
The weather is dry. Cacti rise up
out of hard dirt. Purple lilac live here,
under shade that comes like a hand
over the mountains.

Everyone is kind.
She lounges by a green pool, pale.
In the afternoon, on a summit, equestrian therapy,
set against those shaded mountains,
and fields of Paolo Verde trees in bloom.

Who has she left behind?
Where are they now?
When is it enough?

Wild horses handled who once roamed these fields.
Sweet grass is eaten by the wild pigs
who wander into the fenceless facility during warm nights.

V.

Noise, waves crash--
drowning out schools of children
playing at recess.
She thinks: "When I was a child. . ."
Young, and in love with a boy;
winter in Ohio;
great open spaces where there weren't before.
The wide rivers small and rocky.
The land, dying slow.
Scarecrows, with hay bulging from flannel,
stand erect in fields
cut low.

Young, and in love with a boy
who she's left behind.

***

Big fish swim in the Pacific.
Schools of jellyfish float silently underwater.

Waves crash.
She's lies by the ocean, tanned.
Unaware of the underbelly of the Pacific.
The sun blinds her.
The boy has become an old memory.
Silently, she lies,
with the noise of the ocean drowning all out.