Open Ticket: The Post-Mortem Sketches

By Geoff Peterson

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS
A YOUNG MENTAL PATIENT

Caught in a slow-motion free fall that drops him in the tunnels of a lunatic asylum in the last century, the poet tunes to a faint broadcast where sunlight has not penetrated for millennia. There he returns to himself as a young noble wandering between underworld kingdoms in search of his origin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665513814

Geoff Peterson

Born just after World War II, Peterson inherited his mother's nervous system and went on to memorize and perform poetry in a lyric vein for family and card parties. Raised Catholic, the boy learned the value of dreams, visions, and the soothing aspects of prayer in unison. He later earned degrees in Literature and Writing at Eastern Washington University, and served as poetry editor for Willow Springs Magazine. With the publication of his first novel in 1989, Peterson turned his back on mainstream publishing and has not looked back. Since 2007 he has published nearly thirty books of poetry and fiction. He lives in the Southwest and still gets around.

Book preview

© 2021 geoff peterson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  01/20/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-1379-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-1381-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021900848

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

for the aborted, the broken, the departed...

Open Ticket

the post-mortem sketches

              Cégeste, if I were of our former world,

                          I’d say let’s have a drink.

                                                      —Orpheus

                                                      Jean Cocteau

              Hell is of this world and there are men

              who are unhappy escapees from hell,

              escapees destined ETERNALLY to

              reenact their escape.

                                              —Antonin Artaud

              Open Ticket: a travel document without

              a return date, but with a fixed

              validity period.

                                                  —Google Search

Contents

Preface

Asylum 1

Plumbing

A Book of Spells

Committed: a love story

Intake

The Tunnel

Hindsight, 1947

Paul’s Case, 1965

Scene Work

Boomerang

Miss Turnstiles

Breakthrough

The Unseen

Nobody Home

Curse of the Poet

Apotheosis

Nany’s Funerary Papyri: The Book of the Dead for the Chantress of Amu

Psykosis:

The Snake Pit

The Tunnel of Love

Statuette

The Value of Zero

Asylum 2

Amor Fati

Final Call

Koan

Asylum 3

Ostraca: the dogs

Asylum 4

The Trench

Gentleman Scholar

Asylum 5

Asylum 6

The Wisdom of Nervous Breakdowns

The Architecture of Madness

Banished

Power

World Upon World

The Lower Kingdom

Hiddenness

Probation

The Words

Asylum 7

Diagnosis, 1968

Leather

Wake-Up Call

Enter: Margot

Outage

Messages

Asylum 8

At Group

Open Ticket

Last Dance

Rush to Her Side

Double Agent

I’m Not Here

The Chosen

Lone Wolf

Hallucination

Crossing the Sound

Voices in the Dark

Visiting Privileges

Asylum 9

Asylum 10

Hereby

Chemistry

Little Theatre

Université

Open Enrollment: Intake, cont.

LATE BREAKING: Lost Film Found in Insane Asylum

Destiny: decades hence

A Treasury of Broken Things

Papyrus

Final Summation

Farewell Rites of Nany

Prima Materia

A Life Overboard: Notes on Artaud (1896-1948)

Acknowledgments

Source Notes

About the Author

Preface

I suppose it was always coming to this. Like a lone train moaning far off, the softer it got the more haunting. It was time.

It meant emptying pockets I’d stuffed with shame for fifty years, highlighted by time served in mental asylums before the age of twenty-one: a fact that has always kept me apart and made me weep for an unfinished life. Except for a few fleeting impressions that could just as easily be made up, memory fails me.

I once came across a back issue of the Bellevue Literary Review among faculty discards at a college where my father had taught. The cover photograph was of female patients engaged in basket weaving in the Insane Pavilion of 1910. Poignantly it spoke to me of the broken lives behind walls on Roosevelt Island, and of my own early formation on the East River.

Open Ticket is between me and the boy that would come to write books he could barely understand. Words launched in defiance of what was expected of him, a native of the same infested waters his mother sang to.

Flash forward sixty years: my decision to begin starts with a throw pillow bearing weaved figures from Egyptian mythology. It was purchased 2nd hand by a sorceress I’d once known, an item she regretfully had to abandon.

I hardly paid it more than a cursory glance, until this year, at the start of the latest global pandemic and its attendant quarantines. Between bands of hieroglyphs, I recognized figures found in burial chambers of the lower kingdom. I launched a small scale excavation and found the names and the stories that connected them to a buried chamber in my own heart.

Among them the figures of Anubis, and Mat, Ra, and Set...as watched over by Osiris, lord of underground. I admit to a fascination with the lurid geography of