Friday Poem: "In The Abandoned Asylum"

Spring Grove Hospital is a sprawling mental health facility in Catonsville, Maryland, near the UMBC campus. It has a long and storied history as one of the oldest mental hospitals in the country. In my early college days, we used to venture out late at night from the dorms, seeking snacks or adventure, and often found ourselves exploring the mostly-abandoned hospital grounds. This poem combines a few peoples' experiences at Spring Grove, which our journalism teacher Tom Nugent used to call our "sister campus across Wilkens Avenue."

In the Abandoned Asylum

Broken glass catches faint streetlight—
inside, shadows swirl within shadows.
Time is the only difference between
madness and darkness:  in this coalmine
black, what you see is true even if it isn’t real,
like having fallen down a deep shaft
of your mind and breaking both your legs.

Now, your flashlight is your sanity.
It will remember for you.  In its light,
that granite statue of a dog
becomes a nightstand again;
the baby turtle nailed to the windowsill
is just a window lock;
the groaning crack in the floor
is just a leather strap.

As your eyes adjust to the black, though,
your ears begin to deceive you.
Was that a rustle in the dusty
topography of institutional sheets?
A fingernail tapping the linoleum?
A dragging footstep?
Shake your faltering flashlight,
rattle its batteries.  Don’t scream
when the beam becomes yellow, flickers, fades.

This poem originally appeared in the chapbook Techniques of Avalanche Survival: Poems.