Schizophrenic

by Kevin T McEneaney

When I was a confused ten-year-old,

there were two dimensions in my life:

I played football with multiple concussions

and my elbow shattered into thirty shards;

the other person in my head

read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

(the only “children’s book” in the house).

I didn’t know what micturate meant

because it wasn’t in my dictionary.

Mother brought out the foot-thick

giant Webster dictionary.

I was, of course, embarrassed.

*

I couldn’t understand Swift’s third part,

being too young for philosophic satire,

yet when I entered the land of the Yahoos,

I knew that I had discovered reality,

the reality that underpinned adult life

which I would have to cope with

until there was no more life.

Kevin T McEneaney

Author of The Enclosed Garden and Longing, and other books