One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Under the Sommelier of St. Thomas

In the stone‑walled wards that breathe like hinges,
where the fluorescent buzz hums a monotonous hymn,
he came—McMurphy, the smuggler of swagger
to a place that drank in the scent of disinfectant.

The board room was a cage of shadow and colour,
the red stockings humming neon on the sofa;
Nurse Ratched, the queen of iron lace and calm,
tightening her control with a closed‑mouth smile.

A poem scribbled in the margins—Molly’s quiet vow—
and a fugitive hymn singing in the back of Room 12.
A haphazard drop of paint, splashed on the wall,
a stray note of music that made the silent heart pound.

Freedom, it whispered, was a shell on the edge of a spoon;
Spoon‑fed dreams devoured by the institutional spoon.
Yet the seat, the chair, the milk‑scented room, the bleak cholera
of the network, the snarl of dissent—what they sang in cracks—

It was a rebellion with a ragged, rag‑tangled cape,
a shameful whistle against the copper‑clad arch of authority,
in a place where the cages are reverence.

The corridor, a corridor of manacles of fear,
a council of etiquette, settling the patients’ rage;
they saw a world for the ladies and the pluralities—

The real prison, a place marred by the echo of the bells;
the bright red ladies give to your every start,
the final white scar—but the tick, a calm spin of the flock
was a calling of women.

The cry, an echo, as iron roses in the murky air;
drift, you see, you see McMurphy—look at the life he is.

“That guy and his espresso,” then a hedge of “break the spell,
the idea, the old fire, it is a cow.’’
And the wing of the infamous places, the patient’s silent escape,

And the world, I miss, we right the soul of the world,
men, to...the world. In the original...that swims.

Yet the patient’s world, grown a status, shackles of the soul;

Ratched… edges: the centre. The world that did not forget health.

(In this poem, the native of British spelling dotted the verse with colour, favourite, programme, and centre, all references call through the story of a hospital ward as an island of humanity and disease, stuffed with the precincts of independence, a Man worth that was a sizeable alarm. The call it still prover rack of the ward wears a thin but bloomedness within each broken fate.)