One night in October of 2012, I found myself working graveyard in the highest security ward of our local mental hospital. I don’t normally work there, but as a sign language interpreter I am called to any number of locations to provide communication access for Deaf individuals. On that night it was in this particular wing of our area’s mental health facility.

My client was on suicide watch, but mostly he slept. I sat outside his room on a hard plastic chair observing the milieu, and the troubled residents who existed there unable to sleep. If my client should wake, I’d be available to interpret any conversations between him and the staff. Figuring I’d have plenty of down time, I had brought a book, a notepad and pen, but mostly I just observed.

People who have lost their minds seriously enough to be locked up, carry a burden of pain most of us cannot fathom. I watched them pacing in agitation, scratching, picking, drooling and occasionally screaming. Some lay on the floor like road kill, motionless as if dead, or perhaps wishing that they were. Others were like nocturnal animals, animated by the depths of the night, or the size of the moon.

And me, just sitting there, like a stone on the bank of misery’s river. Their painful emanations lapped against my feet, swirling in eddies around my chair, lulling me into a raw empathy. So much pain in that old institutional, cinder-block building, in our city, in the world, all around us, and I was awash in it.

It wasn’t just the residents, I had problems of my own to consider. Just a few months earlier my longest friendship, of 22 years, had ended in an ugly and devastating way. The chasm, which had opened up between her and me since the fight, felt vast and eternal. How could it be? I wondered, that someone who had existed in the very center of my heart was now gone, leaving destruction and an ocean of blood and tears.

I don’t consider myself a poet, but once in a while a poem will come to me. A poem is like a bubble that forms deep in the soul, then rises to the surface, and pops. When it happens, I consider it a gift, since coaxing poetry from that same depth of spirit is nearly impossible. I don’t know if it was the late hour, all the time spent alone on that hard plastic chair, or the seasons of my own heart — but suddenly I felt it come. I snatched my pad and pen, furiously scribbling until it was here: A poem manifest, spilled onto the page, a wordless feeling that had transmuted itself into a tangible gift. I stared at it and wondered. Was it about her and me, our failure to nurture the original seed of love we had shared? Or, was it about the place where I sat, and the people all around me, lost in the abyss of human suffering?

I don’t think it really matters, a poem is a thing in and of itself.

It stands alone, or it does not stand.

Here is mine, from that night spent with madness, and midnight’s many untold sorrows.