69 Mental health poems

This is the house of Bedlam. This is the man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the time of the tragic man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a wristwatch telling the time of the talkative man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the honored man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the roadstead all of board reached by the sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the old, brave man that lies in the house of Bedlam. These are the years and the walls of the ward, the winds and clouds of the sea of board sailed by the sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the cranky man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances weeping down the ward over the creaking sea of board beyond the sailor winding his watch that tells the time of the cruel man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a world of books gone flat. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances weeping down the ward over the creaking sea of board of the batty sailor that winds his watch that tells the time of the busy man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a boy that pats the floor to see if the world is there, is flat, for the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat that dances weeping down the ward waltzing the length of a weaving board by the silent sailor that hears his watch that ticks the time of the tedious man that lies in the house of Bedlam. These are the years and the walls and the door that shut on a boy that pats the floor to feel if the world is there and flat. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances joyfully down the ward into the parting seas of board past the staring sailor that shakes his watch that tells the time of the poet, the man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the soldier home from the war. These are the years and the walls and the door that shut on a boy that pats the floor to see if the world is round or flat. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances carefully down the ward, walking the plank of a coffin board with the crazy sailor that shows his watch that tells the time of the wretched man that lies in the house of Bedlam.

... in which generally the patient has the sense of having lost contact with things, or of everything having undergone a subtle but all-encompassing change, reality revealed as never before, though eerie in some ineffable way. —Louis Sass Or gallery. Or strange askew museum. Or painting of a hotel bed with some cheap print above the headboard. (Palm tree or a sleigh pulling Xmas trees.) Or the day two-dimensional, subzero as I run the beach along the frozen lake. The waves lathed to Hokusai spirals. Cold gallery, every inch of wall space covered, park benches derbied by snow. House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. House for battered women. House of the servants of His Godhead Reverend Moon Who plots in some Seoul penthouse His glorious death and resurrection. Ten minutes ago I left you to the laying on of hands. Maria talking fast in glottal Polish, and the physical therapist, hugely blonde, lifting your legs, white cocoons of the casts. First up, then to the sides, the hospital bed in the living room hulking, whirring as it moves along with you. To talk of this and you directly, though I can’t. To heal you with my own hands though I can’t. Legs not working, hands not working, tongue encased in plaster. The tongue going numb with the hands. Why my friend Dave loves jazz: to hammer and obliterate the words, nullify too the wordlessness. “Blue Train” on my Walkman as the Moonies leave from house to van, lugging crates of silken flowers. Blue pills that didn’t work. Then my month of yellow pills. To not metamorphose to my father writhing as the charges surge from temples down the spine, a dog’s twitching legs in sleep. To mollify with acronyms: ECT, Odysseuses and Tristans of PDR, yellow Prozac, sky blue Zoloft. To heal you with my own hands though I can’t. The day two-dimensional. (Past and present and to dwell in neither.) Truth-taking stare. Height and width, no depth. On a screen the paramedics ease you from car to ambulance, having labored with a crowbar at the door, and I push again through the crowd on Thorndale.This is my husband. Please let him come with me.

Mother tried to take her life. The icicles thawed. The house, a wet coat we couldn’t put back on. Still, the garden quickened, the fields were firm. Birds flew from the woods’ fingertips. Among the petals and sticks and browning fruit, we sat in the grass and bickered, chained daisies, prayed. All that falls is caught. Unless it doesn’t stop, like moonlight, which has no pace to speak of, falling through the cedar limbs, falling through the rock.

Eat cereal. Read the back of the box over and over. Put on my red velvet jumper with white heart shaped buttons. Walk to the bus, pick up discarded cigarette butts and pretend to smoke. Get on the bus. Girls yell,Wire head, ugly black skin. Take a window seat, under the radio speaker. Look for cats hunting in the fields. Go to class. Stay in at recess. Steal chewing gum, plastic green monkeys and cookies from desks. Eat in bathroom stalls. Pure white light pours in. Try to get a bloody nose by punching myself in the same bathroom after lunch. The teacher passes around pictures of herself pregnant.You werefat! I yell.  Everyone laughs. I lap it like licking honey from a spoon.I was pregnant, what’s your excuse? Everyone laughs. I swallow stones. Grow tired in the afternoons, droop like a sunflower in the lengthening light. Get on the bus. Girls yell,Brillo-head! Zebra! Sit in an aisle seat.Your father’s a nigger! I say,No, he’s a fireman. Laughter all around. Pinch myself shut like squeezing soap from a sponge. Walk home. Sometimes find an unsmoked cigarette in the gravel along the curb—long, white, new. Put it to my lips, pull it away and hold it aloft, movie-star-like, all the way home.

"What you are struggling with," said the psychologist, "is a continuous song, something like a telephone's tone. Nebulous, noncommittal, unrelenting, pretending to give you messages it can't deliver. Because the body is unattached. It is," he said, "like a valentine sent out cold, beautiful, brittle as tomorrow's deja-vu, but distortedly misaddressed. These pills will help you find yourself somewhere where the lace ends up loose and the paste is still humming all about you.

This is what it's like: you sit in the white room singular, knees together arms over your head to break the noise from the radio that is false as a drunk's promise to loan you his car next week. Of course next week never comes lies continue, nobody disbelieves them but some are ready for the real story the young man involved breaks her tired heart it's the usual: spilt liquor, broken dishes, wrecked cars.

“I fucked up bad”: Justin cracks his neck, talking to nobody. Fifteen responsible children, final semester college seniors, bloodshot, collars undone, gorgeously exhausted, return from Wall Street interviews in attitudes of surrender on the Dinky— the one-car commuter train connecting Princeton to the New York line. Panic-sweat sheens their faces. Justin hasn’t seen me yet. “Something’s fucked with my tie.” He’s right. I see his future, the weight he’ll gain first in his face, then gut and ass, the look of bad luck he’ll haunt his bad jobs with. He tears off the tie. Elephants on it. Fatigue,swollen ankles, the midwife said. The worst discomforts of pregnancy. I wrote those down. But she’s wrong: self-pity.Strange dreams, she said. No dreams. Discarded newspapers— business section, money, real estate, auto— sift apart to quartos and folios underfoot. “Shut up, Justin,” says the girl across from him. I hardly recognize Brianna in her interview hair. She scratches her face, fingers trembling from the day’s aftershocks. “I wanted,” she counts on her fingers, performing the sitcom of her tragedy, “Tribeca loft, expense account, designer clothes so haute they don’t look it, my very own Tesla, summer home in the Hamptons I’m too busy to use.” “You wanted money,” says Justin. Brianna: “It went down with the towers.” I spent my lopsided day lifting my belly back towards center, interviewing for adjunct jobs. There’s a half-moon in half-clouds up over the tracks. Justin spreads over three seats, texts with his thumbs, talks: “The Lehman Brothers guy asks me, Did you ever sell anything?Sell me a bottle of water. I’m like fu-uck. To say something I say ‘Why do you like water?’ He says...” Justin fixes a diamond stud back in his ear. “They’ll let me know.” Fifteen responsible children sigh in disappointed relief. Somebody they know didn’t get the job they didn’t get. I sleep. Wake. Beautiful clothes spread bodiless before me! Tailored black suits and skirts, silk ties, ephemera of sheer and filmy stockings deflated over seat backs. Brianna looks around, no conductor coming, squats to peel off, in one motion, skirt, hose, underpants, step butt-naked into soft chino shorts I’ll never be able to afford. “Nervous crotch sweat,” she says. I keep trying to look not-quite-40 in a different way than I’m not-quite-40. The woman interviewer looked at my belly. “As a new mother would you have time to be literary mama to your students?” So I could sue when they don’t hire me for the job I don’t want. Justin looks up from his iPhone: “Soon-Ji got three offers. Fuck.” He flips the curl his mother’s fingers crimped, first day of pre- K into his four-year-old forelock. “He’s guessing he’ll go with Goldman Sachs.” Brianna grabs her neck in living garrote. She high-fives anybody she can reach in gloomy delight. She gobbles snack-pack popcorn, licks her fingers; bits drop yellow from her lips. “My mom will go crazy Deutsche Bank didn’t offer.” She sees me. “I didn’t realize that was you with your hair up. Look, Just.” She high-fives me. “It’s Professor.” Is Brianna crying? “Don’t call me Professor,” I say, dozens of times a semester. “I’m a writer, not a teacher.” Justin grabs a Norton Anthology out of his five-hundred-dollar briefcase. “Fuck. What are we supposed to read for tomorrow?” “Prufrock, dummy,” Brianna says. “You’re a good professor.” She condescends through tears. “Poor baby,” mocks Justin, slumping so low in the seat I only see his shoe soles on the arm rest. The train swooshes through suburban tracts. The moon gets smaller. Brianna arrives mornings to workshop in a fake hurry and the sweats she slept in, probably rolls back in bed after. She hands out slight, surprising poems, apologizes, sips cardboard-container coffee in a recyclable sleeve, turns her BlackBerry to vibrate. It moans like indigestion through class. I hand her one of my self-pity tissues. My ankles are slim. Brianna hates her name. “So tacky. I’d be a Kelly if I were twenty years older.” I’d like to be able to hate her. I’m turning into my Favorite Teachers—so kind, so industrious, so interested and interesting. “Sorry I’m late with my portfolio,” she says through sniffles. She dabs her lip. “I had to prepare for,” a breath, “interviews.” A few times a semester I say “It’s only poetry.”Gumbleeds! nosebleeds! the midwife predicted, and it’s true, my Kleenexes are measled with blood,weird hairs,stretch marks, frequent catnaps,hip joints so loose you must take care

Hunkered down, nerve-numb, in the carnal hut, the cave of self, while outside a storm rages. Huddled there, rubbing together white sticks of your own ribs, praying for sparks in that dark where tinder is heart, where tender is not.

After her pills the girl slept and counted Pellet on pellet the regress of life. Dead to the world, the world's count yet counted Pellet on pill the antinomies of life. Refused to turn, the way's back, she counted Her several stones across the mire of life. And stones away and sticks away she counted To keep herself out of the country of life. Lost tally. How the sheep return to home Is the story she will retrieve And the only story believe Of one and one the sheep returning home To take the shapes of life, Coming and being counted.

All master narratives of the mind in a rowboat and the rowboat as beautiful as the swamp glowing the dungeon-state lily pads, unfolding like riddles of water, the Plasticine heads of amphibians, speckled skin of religious fervor, and the razor-blade weeds. All master narratives of the body in a rowboat at the bottom of the swamp that has no hands. All master narratives of the spirit in the rowboat sky reflecting the infant swamp, clouds of filth, soil knotted like tupelos and toppled alphabets. All master narratives of the skin in a rowboat inside a pine coffin of swamp water. All master narratives of thinking like a woman who says, 
“I choose inappropriate relationships.” All master narratives of dramatic structure in the soggy swamp, against the humid flags beating the wind. All master narratives of mythology like my son saying, “and then he turned into a very big wolf.” “I think he was very sad.” “He has feelings too, you know.” “I think he was sad because he got trapped inside the doors.” “Oh my god, there are different Fenrirs.” “Loki’s Fenrir met a different Fenrir.” “Are wolves part of the cat family?” “Hey, look up on your phone if they can change forms because these guys look different from the real Fenrir.” “See that white picture where he’s up on top? He turns huge and tries to eat the sun.” “Oh, that’s a tough Fenrir.” “I think he obeys the serpent.” “Now that’s sad Fenrir.” “Or maybe Loki turns into the serpent.” “Oh, Loki, are you a master of evil?” “I think they can change forms.”