The Old Neighbor Marcello Poem by Benjamin Chiu Uy

The Old Neighbor Marcello

Time, ignominous time,
On the broken wings of sanity,
You disappeared and left an old man in the throes of insanity,

Clipped on his medical files were these old anomalies of genealogy
He sees himselfa completestranger on the strangeface on a mirror,
He became an unknown, unknown to seasons,
This time he was unsure of his own existence

He was uncertain of entries to which of a houses, which doors, which streets enters his whereabouts,

Fumbling on misleading hallsuncertain walls of the bedroom door and the sala,
he was on an enchanted territories, entrances forgetting the stairways,

Nor the entries of this feeble memory into the name of a daughter, then his wife,
Where was he?
Speech cannot connect with the words he is speaking,
He spoke of a title and then it became a vanishing smoke,

He though they were boarders,
From out of nowheres, somewhere,

From the boundaries of dementia,
They were people most likelyfrom the moon
Once they were someone interrelated,

He grinned and asked"who are you people? "
He became himself unknown and someone else.
He was confined to Mandaluyong MentalHospital
and he never knew who he was.