When I was 14

When I was 14 they locked my mother away in a hospital's padded room.
Where they wouldn't let her come home.
I would visit her with my Dad totally embarrassed,
a little but sad and a little bit mad.
I can't recall how long she stayed.
It seemed like forever but it could've been a couple of days.

I'd sit in the long lonely hallway and think why i'd been so bad
that they too her away. I'm sorry but shd had to stay. She went crazy.
Everybody goes crazy. Everybody loses touch with reality. She saw ducks
in tin hats and pirates dropping down out of the ceiling.
Who hasn't when you take way too much medicine?
We all lose our minds. I'm sure someday I'm gonna lose mine.

When I was 10 she got sick and the doctors prescribed cure alls
that ended up killing her 13 years later.
My whole life changed the day she was taken away to God.
I knew then she could never come back to me.
I know hospitals well, their smell, antiseptic death.
I was in so many, so often, for too many years in a row.
The scars run deep as my paranoia that I'm on the same road.
And it's just a matter of time before they take me away too.

Time is playing tricks on me. As I get older I remember the silliest
things. How her eyes were like glass. How she looked in her hospital gown.
Sometimes I dream it all over like the day hasn't passed. And I'm back
in that moment, sitting in that long lonely hallway and that crazy old
man is trying to escape again. The girl who fried her brain on PCP calls me
Mary. And Mom has to stay. She has to stay until the medicine doesn't make
her crazy anymore. Yes, I worry one day it'll be my daughter sitting in that
long lonely hallway waiting for me but I have to stay.