‘Shadows on a Screen’

AND MURDERED THROUGH


And murdered through their masks, as if to sift
My trembling from the air; the corridors
Grew longer, bending out of shape, and drift
Enshrouded every threshold. Through the doors
Came whispers, half‑remembered, half‑designed,
That pressed like winter’s knuckles on my chest;
And still the ward‑lights flickered, re‑aligned
To mark the pulse of something unexpressed.
I walked as though the floorboards might collapse,
Or tilt me toward a darkness I had known,
Where every echo tightened into traps
And every heartbeat felt no longer owned.

Yet through that trembling hush, a figure stood—
A patient, pale as frost upon a blade—
Who watched me with a calm misunderstood,
As if my fear were something he had made.
He raised a hand, then let it fall again,
And muttered fragments drifting into sense:
That storms of thought could batter any brain,
That none were proof against experience.
His voice, though cracked, retained a tempered grace,
A cadence forged from long‑endured despair;
And in the trembling angles of his face
I saw a truth too heavy to declare.

For madness, in its quietest disguise,
Can settle like a frost upon the bone;
It does not always shout, but softly lies
In corners where the mind stands most alone.
And so I passed him, feeling something shift—
A weight that was not his, nor wholly mine—
As though the ward itself began to lift
Its veil and show the seams beneath design.
The nurses moved like shadows on a screen,
Their footsteps merging with the humming vents;
The world grew thin, translucent, in between
The drifting of my fractured sentiments.

And still the year went on, a tightening thread
That pulled me through each hour’s unsteady frame;
The nights were long, the mornings filled with dread,
Yet somewhere in that cycle, something came—
A gentler breath, a pause within the storm,
A moment where the mind, though bruised, could rest.
It did not heal, nor wholly re‑transform,
But held itself with slightly steadier chest.
And in that pause, I learned to stand again,
To walk the ward without the same despair;
To see, in every trembling fellow‑patient,
A fragile strength that hovered in the air.

So through the endless corridors I moved,
Not cured, not whole, but slowly re‑aligned;
And though the year remained a thing unloved,
It left a quiet scaffold in my mind—
A place where all the fractured thoughts could meet,
Where shadows softened, though they did not cease;
Where every trembling pulse, though incomplete,
Could find a moment’s tentative release