Reconstructed on your living room floor,
of upturned buckets, wooden planks, tin cans,
the plastic cover of a pornographic DVD:
‘This is the Temple of Solomon,’ you said.
Hair and beard grown wild as a prophet's –
entangled and matted as your thoughts –
an Elijah or John the Baptist, misunderstood,
intoning messages from God.
No diet of locusts and wild honey here –
only Pot Noodle on a broken stove,
in this, the wilderness you once called home.
The windows and furniture all now smashed –
the only things which had been left intact
from the whispered sorrows of your life:
the faithless wife, redundant job,
the stillborn child.
We sent you off, on Section 3, in a discreet grey van,
clutching your Bible in the cold, indifferent dawn,
to fill you up with olanzapine or clozapine until
you stop
dreaming of Jerusalem.
.
© Elizabeth Napier, reproduced with permission
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