Clover Smith

I am psychiatric survivor. I went from valedictorian of my class in high school to F's in collage, collapsing from the grief of not being loved. I rescued a girl from a psychiatry ward the eve the girl was to receive electric shock. Soon after, locked up myself, I escaped after 4 electric shocks. Flashbacks 13 years later exploded in suicidal and homicidal terror. Re-committed to psychiatry and discharged a psychiatric drug addict 7 months later. After a year, I recycled between periods of vegetable apathy and exploding suicidal and homicidal drug rages. After 10 years, I quit the drugs and cycled between exploding suicidal and homicidal drug withdrawal rages. Judged a danger to myself and others, I was sentenced to a psychiatric nursing home. Following the instructions of my mentor, a bug on the windowsill, I soon escaped.

After 31 years I had accumulated about 50 commitments with over 7 years locked up, about 12 years as in-patient into real hospitals for life-threatening damage from psychiatric drugs or suicidal attempts, 100's of emergency room visits and had wasted about a million dollars of taxpayers' money by staying alive. Now I was physically, mentally, and emotionally devastated, still suicidal and homicidal. A male nurse in an emergency room said to me, "Go to Alcoholics Anonymous; they teach people how to get well there." I went and they do. The 12 steps brought about profound change from psychiatric terror to happiness within, I married the boy of the merry-go-round and we lived happily ever after.

I am the Author of Escape from Psychiatry; Founder and Director of Welcome World, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, Psychiatric Survivors' Psychological Rehabilitation Center Where Unity, Truth, and Love is the Goal and the Blessing: a 12 Step, Self-Help Educational Cure/Alternative/Replacement for Brain-Disabling Psychiatry; Presenter-designee for 8th Annual ICSPP Conference, October, 2005. (The International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (ICSPP) is a nonprofit research and educational network.)

For more about and by Clover and her projects, visit www.welcomeworld.org and www.escapefrompsychiatry.org

I Have Been There

I have been there
That place of breathless stagnation
The silent scream kicked back
Into the throat forever
My speech was slow broken syllables
Apart in few spaces
A sentence was a whole different world

I have been there
That place with the bug on the window sill
Proprietor of more power and prestige than I
He my master and I his slave
I did what the bug told me to do
Move this foot move that
And my foot moved
And carried him food

I have been there
That place of the hopeless helpless
That place of man made night
Where a talking bug is the voice of reason
And the higher calling
That place where the bug escaped
And so I did
Following my master
Into the dignity of man

Sing-YO

I got him off death-row at the Dumb Friends League
A dog with one lop ear and one ear perked up
A trembling dog singing Take me I am only love
Singing Yo Singing is the only way to go
Singing Sing Yo Take me I am only love

And he was Sing-Yo singing I am only love
Singing singing is the only way to go
A city dog that became a country dog displaying his smile
Waging his tail wagged the whole back end of his body
And he was Singing Sing-Yo singing

Self glorious sentinel to his mistress and master
First to greet the visitors and the last to part
Self dedicated job of following his master
Self assigned guardian from all interlopers
Singing Sing-Yo singing
Leaped happily after the field mouse
To instant death under the tractor wheel

And he is Sing-Yo singing I am only love
Singing is the only way to go
______________________________

Daddy’s Girl

Kulugh Kulugh Kulugh

Arms snubbed the prancing horse
To the knotted hitching rack
Arms reached for the pole
Sounding the rhythmic staccato club
Of her daddy beating the horse again

Kulugh

The little girl picked up her doll
Reaching arms reached out for her
She straightened its legs and stood it up
Each leg forward to the sound

Kulugh Kulugh Kulugh

Her daddy’s voice cursed the air
The horse lay dead upon the ground
Racked with the harness
Still swaying on it’s back

Kulugh

The girl put down her little doll
Retied its bonnet strings
Leaned it against the polished wood
Let the curve of her mirror hold it

Kulugh Kulugh Kulugh

And the maiden dressed
In her long red gown
And went out dancing
Each foot forward to the sound

Kulugh
_______________________

Night Reverence: Circa 1950

On the hearthstone of spring
Pulsating warmth pushes downward
Through crystalline beds

Converge in the maelstrom
Of color and perfume
Forming to be

Gathers filaments and streamers
Into the stability of leaf
And passion of flower

The crocus pushes from bondage
Into its reach of the sky
And trembles in a dance of ecstasy

Ripples ripple movement
Nearby mud slides upward
The toad elevates its head

A girl knocked into a coma
Four times on the electric table
Escapes the locked door

Running for her life
Stumbling from the head injury
Her feet reaching for the road home.

Through ragged holes torn
In the canopy of night
The lights of heaven blaze

_______________________

On How to Become a God

Pick the finest of quarry for thrilling power
Humans are easy free for the taking
Doctor their brains oh doctor their brains
Tattooing them all the way through
Non-people worthless things caricatures

With electricity drugs and carving knife
Confuse isolate stupefy
Set up to worship and never to tattle
All hopeless and helpless and all yours
Doing whatever you whim them to do

Tooth them to kill and they kill for you
Smirk them to die and they die for you
Groaning mounds dangle from your belt
You own the trophies of their souls
You are the nazi gods of the holocaust
_______________________________

Evening Concert

My step into the eminence of domed lighting
Delayed by my prolonged attention
To the hopscotch rush hour of the day
I take my reserved front row seat
After the overture has started

Cast of hundreds on a submerged stage
Remote tones low and off side
Caught inward with mutual intricacies
Cascade into the erupting rapture
Crescendo concert of the frogs

My husband's callused hand lying in mine
In my lace and starch aproned lap
We join the peaceful elbow greese of evening
Spit and polishing up the stars