Depression

[71degrees]

It announces itself at the door,
a steel pointed probe,
ridiculous laugh. Neck-back-arched
guffaw.

You stand in the center of a stagnant pool. No
colors to be sure
but gray and cool they slink about like rootless spooks,
checking your soft core with that steel prod.

Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom.

The echoing of water dripping in some far off iron chamber
slows down to a groan where sound waves ooze
like pimpled oil.
The mercury bar falls, and with it its silence
a baffling crash.

Oh, but windows are a fright now,
letting in blasted light and skin and bones and
frailties which despise. Pink mouths and their
castle white teeth mechanically moving up and down, toot tooting,
faster and faster,
out of rhythm or sense.

In the bleak city where buildings loom over pulled
shrieks in alien sounds of metal pipes and cars,
the olden days flash by: a black and white still of a horse drawn carriage and a black top hats silhouette against the building's
sky.
And far from the madding crowd, in some penthouse apartment,
those honking, shrieking, howling calls rise, and coalesce,
high up in the sky, where they blur, and hum, and rush into a comforting drone, like a reassuring clock tick, ticking away.

You doze in your cedar smelling attic room where paper dolls dangle from your sweetly lazy arm.

The poem seems a bit "bi-polar" at times (e.g. "…your body parts iron ball and chain you…") or ("…dangle from your sweetly lazy arm."). I like images that make me work. B/c of the title and the opening personification, I know what I'm getting into so I'm okay with it.

"…far from the maddening crowd..." is a really nice literary allusion. Bravo.

Would love to see this in first person. Second person separates the narrator from the depression. First person would bring it down to the narrator's level where it should be. You're giving too much away and not taking license for the topic by presenting this in second person. Can you tell I don't like it in second person?

Nice poem. Difficult topic. Good luck w/this.