Dedicated to all who struggle with pharmalogistics
What have I done? says my sand bag suited body,
through a sigh heaved in sieved through gravity rocks in head
and gravelly aura.
Dry coughed up-take uninhibited
unsmoothed serotonin-less mind.
Forehead wrinkles carved in(stead). The center of my head
craves a sparkling pineal gland punch -
sunrise colored, a light cocktail, some levity, a few laughs even. Or even to lift my arm pins (and needles).
People everywhere are happy its spring and say so. Not me.
The sunlight is inconsiderate, interrogating.
Admit it! You are not growing new shoots!
And shadows so sharp, they cut me off.
(I’m giving my shadow the finger as it steers into a tree.)
Suddenly sure of the way my head hangs like brick on a stalk. I’ve seen it in my classroom, that same heavy head held in hands, then a sudden examination of those hands as if foreign, therefore guilty.
This slowness is not gentle.
I recall worse times, when one thought to think and then the next no way to conclude, it looped instead and
tried to make a dollar out of 99cents,
she missed, she missed, she missed like this …
Could be worse! Growls logic, which does not hold my hand,
but walks ahead of me.
What have I done now? is a litany of offenses bricking me in. A walled off pile of guilty rubble withholding light, but leaking tears. Doesn’t help anyone says logic.
Logic always looking down though.
Just one person without their meds. A chosen course of no meds. A six-month weaning and not because I am offended by meds, or because I think I’m weak if I take meds. Certainly not brainwashed by the medical model – I refused them for years and
hobbled along, if only, if only, if only…
Then I said, haven’t you tried enough? Haven’t you will-fisted your way through weeks months years? Haven’t you done health food, meditation and jogging penance and still feel like a cement helmet steers you down every chance it gets? Aren’t you tired of not getting anywhere that is a place that people actually want to go?
Of saying to yourself, this doesn’t count.
Didn’t you talk and talk and talk and cry over and over about the past sadnesses with the help of bad boyfriends and hormones?
Even then, logic was always there, cooly explaining The Reason.
Still, it did not warm you up, or offer to wear that helmet for you. Go ahead: you can always perform an analysis!
(It always goes ahead) Explain, explain, show and see and I told you so and I’m way ahead of you and you better catch up, idiot. You slow sad idiot.
Now I’m just as mean as she was. Just as greedy, just as guilty. I have no one to blame and if you ask karma, I never did. And karma doesn’t flinch when it comes to what it comes to. It’s impartial and this logic is a mystery to those who want this to count and this not to.
Does it have to count if you feel ugly, sick, stupid?
Even all the time you do?
No one deserves to be treated this way you wouldn’t talk that way to your best friend put a picture of yourself when you were little on your table you wouldn’t talk that way to her
would you would you would you?
All the tools you have the things you’ve learned the people who have helped you the people you have helped
if onlyif only ifonly
You got the right supplements, exercise, shelving system.
You had enough time space money sleep.
Its up to you to make your life meaningful.
I can’t even make my bed.
You are lazy, must not care enough.
Some part of you must ENJOY feeling miserable!!!
You think other people don’t suffer?
You aren’t special.
Basically, you are extremely lazy.
Now my spine’s a spiny seamonster, hooking into my brain.
I swallow myself now, only myself.
At yoga today, there is something wrong with my face. I can see its distortion in the mirror - a desiccated layer that used to be a feelings alley, making an expression, moving through, making another one. It’s stuck now. There is a scab mask under my face and over my skull. I try to rub it away but it doesn’t break up under the skin. Forehead is especially hard. Eyebrow bones like a stone door to an oubliette.
As I lay in corpse pose, I notice the ceiling tile above me has a water-stain baby monster. A shut spigot is its eye. Perpetually just out of reach, is another water stain of a breast. He cannot reach it, cannot even see it. But I do. I am here to witness the separation.
Then I had to go to the dentist and start the crown process. When I jumped when she stuck me with the q-tip of pre-numbing gel, I knew it was going to be an ordeal. I confessed to Dr. Sanso that I was off my meds and sensitized. Eventually, I had to wear the Nitrous Mask. It seemed to cover my whole face, but she said it didn’t, and could still reach inside my mouth. More needles and the burning teeth smell with cold water spray and mosquito in ear drill. The gas closed my eyes and she gave me ear plugs too. Then the gas displaced my concerns, in spite of the sound of semi-trucks driving through my molars.
Amusing, but not the best use for a nice buzz.
The gas filled my empty brain pockets. I was broke but it fell like star money from the deep dark sky.
Later when it wore off, I drank a beer, and took three aspirin. I like drugs, I say to myself.
What is so wrong with not wanting to be in pain?
**********************************
Overnight I have moved into a bad neighborhood. People are poor and ugly, things stink, there is rough talk in the scraggly grass and condescending platitudes on billboards hovering over houses:
“No one can drive you crazy unless you give them the keys”
I’m a thief that has stolen something very valuable, or maybe its just potatoes for dinner.
There are closets heaped with disorderly things – what do I do with these things? They have all swollen in size.
I say: its just a comb, just a stain, just an ugly coffee cup that no one needs.
But the debts demand an answer I can’t give, an action I can’t remember to do, and they always refuse my excuse.
******************************
I must have shopped for packets of instant rage in my sleep. I need only a whiff of rejection, and I want to denounce all relationships once and for all.
Alchemize alone into all one.
One in myself says the feminist psychologist– the true virgin needs no one to define her, no one to cheer her up,
no one to approve.
I would take this where it’s not supposed to go:
just needs no one.
I used to think I had to live as if any minute I would have to survive an invasion of soldiers, capture, torture.
I thought it was smart of me to expect that – all my clothes were black, a uniform of protection, utlilty.
I served in this regime for over seven years.
A stoic army of one, an ongoing secret battle.
No medals earned.
I thought it was a necessary alertness – it could solve the old bad dream of having to drive the family car at age six.
Panic seeped in as if my preparation was its invitation.
Under the gun of flared nerves: the world is not safe, people are disappointing, death takes the ones who might have helped, and leaves the ones who carelessly inflict pain.
I want not to care, but mine is a knot to care.
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