When Caring is Crippling
I’ve never put a person in a box,
I can imagine it quite
debilitating,
being pushed, being punched, being scrunched, being shaken
from a six foot
human being
into a shitting, shivering, cowering
four by four cabinet, weeping
as a father cursing god and swearing
ignores the instruction manual
as if he were playing
the life game,
and all the while your teeth hang out
painfully right angled into poorly constructed door handles
that rot, that crunch, that shiver, then just
crumble away with every touch
like the murky old furniture
left in the back garden until you find time
to get to the tip, but there never is time
until you are downtrodden by the elements
and left this shriveling, messy
ambivalent former
useful
object.
I’ve never put a person in a box,
but I’ve ticked many
and been given tablets with ecstasy’s sinister
smiling face, a fork pronged therapist tongue
and the look of empathy - but only at a distance,
in a society
when a hug is a hindrance, when attention is annihilating,
when the money is missing from the mentally disenchanting,
when community caring is crippling
the only box I want to be put in
is my
coffin.
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