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Artwork in Progress and Red Rum Updated
Tag Archives: creativity
Pencil Art done under Barbaric Conditions at Hospital of Central CT: Brutal Aversive Conditioning.
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There were few rewards for behavior that toed the line at New Britain General Hospital (HOCC). Mostly it was punishment. If I was found with even a stub of a forbidden pencil, I was carried off to the Supermax seclusion cell, stripped naked and left alone.
At that point, being teeth-chatteringly blue with cold, I would swat a nurse in such a way that she would feel assaulted and bring on the goon squad of “I want to hurt someone today” guards to put me in four point restraints.
Why would I induce this? Because then they would at least cover me up afterwards with the mercy of a sheet, for modesty not warmth mind you, and I would beg for a blanket in vain. But at least my body would be protected from head to toe from the blasts of the A/C up full bore, and I could rest after I had had screamed out my lungs and my despair for a lonely twenty minutes or more.
No one cared, no one heard or paid any attention. The doors were double, and the cell was utterly soundproof. NO one ever even knew I was locked in there. When my screaming was too heart-wrenching for the softer ones of the staff down the hall in the room where they had retired to, they simply turned down the monitor and intercom so they didn’t have to listen.
I know, because I heard when the telephone rang, telling the person sitting outside the inner door they could turn it back on now (after I had quieted down). This was brutality of the nth degree. But they always called it treatment for safety, though I mentioned the CMS regs to the security guards one day as they were inflicting their usual pain in order to bring me to the room, and they stopped in their tracks.
“You’re kidding,” one said, “Its true that the only legal reason for seclusion is Imminent Danger to self or others?” (I had been brought there for disturbing the peace…)
I nodded, Look it up. She looked gravely at the others. but proceeded o do what she had been ordered to do anyway. And I proceeded to behave in a wildly immodest and terrified fashion likewise…knowing I would be left alone and freezing for at least two to three hours, no matter how fast I calmed myself.
They didn’t care. it was PROTOCOL…
Hospital Of Central CT: Smearing Shit at W1: An Angry Poem but an Honest one.
HOLY SHITE AND URINE TEAM
Her cool wordless RN face expresses nothing
as she scoops the ice cream turd and quickly disinfects.
But I think for her, thinking, knowing this:
“Asshole, shithead, you think
your shit don’t stink…” While I have no working sense of smell,
I know I’m an unofficial pain in the ass here
because no one can be officially PIA
on a psychiatric ward, not even I, the wild shit smearer
who knows no disgust first hand
for not smelling it.
What I know well and sadly is
the consequences of disgusting others,
the distancing, the shunning,
how killing the ultimate loneliness is, double-locked away
in a soundproof seclusion cell.
Shackled naked into leather 4-point restraints, I shriek my soul away,
from the bottom of my lungs for 20 minutes straight.
The illegally silenced intercom remains dumb.
Even the 1:1 monitor positioned behind the door.
peering lazily through the judas-eye of a small plexi-port-hole,
doesn’t really pay attention. Why bother, the shit smearer
gets what she deserves.
Oh, I know I disgust them, what with my out of control turd throwing
and my illegible scribbling with my feces on the wall
but they refuse me so much as a marker and board,
and they won’t sit down to listen when I speak.
Mute for 16 days, I will be heard now, one way or another.
But this is no way to think, and i think without thinking, just do with do do, mindlessly, enraged by trauma.
I foul myself because no one cares,
because their disgust is threaded, even so heat-felted with hatred
they have long forgotten I’m just another patient
with problems bigger than the shit I fling.
Instead, cucumber skinned nurses sneer their disgust,
Bad dog! Bad, bad dog!
But I know dog is just God spelled backwards.
And God created the living world
from dust and mud and excrement.
I am no god, I am Live backwards to Evil:
I create chaos from utter chaos within.
There are always turds to form and fling.
And in the end all they can do is kill me.
Fuck me! Do me a favor you turds, kill me!
But first, you have to silence the hate on your faces,
clean the smeared walls,
and pretend I am nothing to you.
When you came in to take me down,
restrain me for any excuse, even for just wanting a blanket.
you had to breath in my shit, that fear,
and knew what it could do to you.
You’d heard the stories, deadly E-coli, C diff.
Something in me might kill you,
I don’t know what scared you more, my wildyelling
or my excrement.
That was always the struggle. Shit stinks. I stank.
You hated me for my smell. You feared me for what I did.
I know your fear. It was: what would happen if you
lost control of yourself.
Would you, control freaks,
too dance naked in dung?
New Poem: About Mutism
PHILOMELA* edited after months of mutism
I haven’t spoken out loud in several weeks
bullied into a frightened by myself silence.
Though what does “speechless” mean
in these days of text-to-speech software,
with its choice of Vikki or Samantha or Victoria voices,
Or when I’m possessed of a blogging platform
and writing fluency enough to speak my mind to my heart’s content?
Still, being mute is not a manner of speaking.
i tell you I could speak, I can talk. Nothing physical impedes
my tongue, or locks my lips,
except my brain’s hallucinated snarls, like Jerry Mahoney
and Charlie McCarthy thrown into surrounding shadows
ordering up this stoppage, blockage, blockade.
Now, like that fire-fangled bird at the end of the mind
feathered unlucky, tarred, locked in golden cage
my voice remains only a memento
of everything that I wanted
to say, but couldn’t get out, I couldn’t get out, I couldn’t get it out…
*In the Greek myth, Philomela is raped and has her tongue cut out by Tereus, the husband of her sister Procne. Rendered mute, Philomela weaves a tapestry detailing the crime to inform her sister, who, enraged, takes revenge on Tereus. At the end of the story, both Procne and Philomela are transformed into birds. Some versions have Philomela become a nightingale, the female of which does not sing. In other versions she becomes a swallow, which is a non-singing bird.
Red Rum in Red Room (or Why is that Cat Scared of Me?): a painting by Pamwagg
Yes I actually managed to paint this picture — in gouache, not oils, true, but I did it, I picked up paints and brushes and from start to finish made a complete painting. This is a big step for me. True, I did the running shoes picture a bit earlier but that was really just a sketch. I have been drawing for so long, and so scared of painting that it feels really BIG that I did this, good or bad a picture though it might be. Sooooo, what’ja think? (By the way, it is a self-portrait – not flattering but hey…)
Poem of Grief: When I Lose You
WHEN I LOSE YOU
When I lose you,
will you remember the leaves
of my brown name?
Not like an oak, which clings
snow after snow
but like the poplar
spilling her yellow dress
to the insistent fingertips of fall
The mother of grief
is a kind forgetting
and I tell you now
that I will forget everything
I will forget even you, beloved
Remembering light
like a leaf stilled in limestone
who would have thought
we could weigh so little?
My only Sweetheart, Dead, and a Poem About Her…
WHOM IS IT REALLY WE KILL? OF WHOM IS IT REALLY WE DREAM?
Is it only two years the little cat’s dead now?
She persists
not in an innocent’s dream
but at my door, so real
I can feel her fur in my tears.
Whoever called the injections
by which we kill our animals “sleep”
had no conscience.
Euphemisms hide facts
but they do not change them, for surely
if my brain believed there was good in her death,
Eemie would not reappear like Banquo’s ghost,
reproaching with her presence
telling me truths I already know:
Even cats can die of loneliness
and she had had enough of being left to fend for herself.
Of course, there was food and water,
but after my father’s death,
she gave up waiting for some density of me
to return, to connect.
Then she gave up wanting me or food.
And when her liver failed
it was too late for anyone’s love to save her.
But what of her last look-around at the stainless world?
How could I think it curiosity,
that sudden raised head,
when it was only a reflex to euthanasia?
How could I not understand such plain table truth?
I asked the vet how long it would take.
“She’s already gone,” the vet said.
Impromptu Starbucks Sketch (Hey TexasTom, If you are brave enough, so can I be…!)
The next one is a work in progress, about four point restraints and abject terror, if I can accomplish what I want to do in my usual pencil painting… SO far so good, but we will see.
Horse Drawing
See My Handmade Jewelry Page
Check out my “Handmade Jewelry” page in the menu at the top.
Gouache of Running Shoes by Pamwagg
Four-point Restraints at the Institute of Living, Hartford Hospital for 19 hours +
New Portraits of African Americans by Pamwagg
Dreamrly’s COLLECTIVE Dream Art Magazine Has Launched
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Chained: New Art
Original Art: How NOT to Treat Schizophrenia: with sound
Trying again…
Still not playable on ipads or iphones, not sure why. I think the sound will work. for what its worth…
Youtube video with sound available for all devices here:
How Not to Treat Schizophrenia or any other Mental Illness: Slide Show
No music or sound, sorry. Best viewed in small screen as the conversion to Quick-time made the files smaller and hence less crisp when seen on a large screen…I’m sorry but this doesn’t seem to be viewable on an ipad..Dunno about android devices. At least I notice that the controls are unavailable on my ipad at any rate…Will try to find another format that will work and re do it…SO SORRY!
Youtube video with sound here :
Blackbird landing on Snow
Parrots PAinting
Michelangelo’s “Dawn”
WAGblog: Dum Spiro Spero 