69 Mental health poems

Panic attacks your pain-porous skin? Imagine the layers of onion, Sufi-circling and circling until there is no tear-making body. If the issue is anorexia, taking starvation’s dark spirit-flight, or anhedonia, running from the skin’s having fun, consider the mushroom’s fleshy erection, and the pumpkins, earth goddesses and rotund Buddhas sprawled by compost’s funky aerosol. For social phobia, desensitize among the rows of corn’s parade, ticker tape leaves and Rasta tassels that wind-strut and bring on the crows’ hop and rap. Too much affect: meditate on potatoes, taciturn as overturned stones. Too little: visualize the hanging tomatoes’ insides, the soft hearts, sentimental ornaments. From the lettuce there is common sense for narcissism: acceptance as side dish, garnish for a meaty sandwich. If that leaf isn’t the dose, there’s always the soil people shovel and level, rake and make wishful with seed, feed leftovers from the compost’s vegan sewer, the soil that wants for nothing and yields and yields.

The Soul has Bandaged moments - When too appalled to stir - She feels some ghastly Fright come up And stop to look at her - Salute her, with long fingers - Caress her freezing hair - Sip, Goblin, from the very lips The Lover - hovered - o'er - Unworthy, that a thought so mean Accost a Theme - so - fair - The soul has moments of escape - When bursting all the doors - She dances like a Bomb, abroad, And swings opon the Hours, As do the Bee - delirious borne - Long Dungeoned from his Rose - Touch Liberty - then know no more - But Noon, and Paradise The Soul's retaken moments - When, Felon led along, With shackles on the plumed feet, And staples, in the song, The Horror welcomes her, again, These, are not brayed of Tongue -

abdominal and/or epigastric pain, digestive issues, heart pain could the opium have gone bananas tripped a deeper horror? say the chiu chau defeat the green gang take control of the comprador colony make a chungking mansion out of every high-rise tower n tu yueh-sheng n chiang kai-shek kick mao tse-tung in his long march and blast chinese workers back to american levels of oppression fragrant harbor as chicago of the east all the girls go suzie and a thousand gross-out william holdens fantan the port reveals america’s fascist sympathies sooner land of the free goes all man in the high tower and china industrializes quicker on gangster cash enters the arms race and puts mutual assured destruction on notice what reversal would right its left then? say hannah arendt waxes total recall n chow yun-fat schwarzeneggers our cyborg asses all the way to daddy cool too cool for nuclear winter school

Unblacken the holy mallow, the incorrupt, the foregut inconclusion. St. Cuthbert’s cole, a stalky stand-up, the deadpan peevish. Splenetic, the marooned fascicles, the testy watchman- hockleaf-clock. Ad hoc the anti- antibodies, the ripped-open open-pollinating poultice, the self-sowing aggrievement.

A Pindaric Poem

For sleeplessness, your head face down, your shoulder blades floating and aspirin as a last resort, when death is threatening, though lately I have experimented with numbers and as for dreams I've never been boring and only once did I bite the arm of a woman sitting next to me and I should be careful, she might have a hand-written poem or a memoir and didn't I bite her arm and aren't we both poets, though I warn her that I make gurgling noises and twitch in both legs and make the bed jump and I am exhausted from looking at poems and I don't care about her nuts and bolts and she has to go to the wilderness herself and fuck the exercises, let her get smashed by a Mack truck, then she'll be ready to mourn.

I’d often seen the runway kissed by refugees and bought-out hostages, an odd drunk and those renouncing the flying for good, and thought that surely there must be worse places to touch freedom. Between the tailfins and the gray town in the distance, gravity cropped up only at a newsstand, and fizzled out with the first bite of the octane damp, the view of the parking bunkers and stacked hovels by the motorway. Everything else, before and after, could have fitted into half a cigarette, the sickly sunshine and endless nights, the flags and oaths (the very language I wanted to forget), the Celts, the Saxons, the housebroken Vikings in crowded trains, hopping frozen behind stalls selling tat to tourists. Not enough time for loving because of other loves, nor codebooks nor guides except the perennial A to Z of not giving offense. The words were always there, smooth like pebbles (soap on the tongue), and sometimes the mockery of a commonplace, like that time when we put up a blackened Union Jack instead of curtains between us and the Poles on the scaffolding across the road. On occasions it seemed good enough to be happy or scared with the rest, to bring home from the terraces and parades that sly acceptance, to sit in the shadow of atavism as under a palm tree, and chew blissfully on the sweet dirt, the taste of the crowd. Or for an evening make a shortcut through someone else’s work, an incomer’s story of a homeland gained not lost, a fat compendium of patriotic verse; in essence, cheat again. In other words — never spend too much on a suit rarely worn    ...    if there had been loyalty at all, it fell on faces and disappeared with them, on promises and smiles, crazy schemes for finding undiscovered shores. The world, I thought, could be unfolded anywhere, if only you could fit it into a travel bag, into a clear, irrevocable word. It is strange perhaps that even today I think the same, still in the same place, buried firmly like a rock in a graveyard, as heavy, and as pointlessly decorated by lightness. The vows of yesterday skim the heights like animal shapes we recognize in passing clouds; postcards sleep in the unread books. Just like the nomadic tribes used to, I learn of myself only with my feet now, from the single map that remained. And when streets bring the shortened future a bit nearer, with open palm I seek the roughness of the facades, and in the friendly pain I find the coarse, unperfected truth of things. This, I think then, must be what it’s like in the bellies of gigantic animals: wet and quiet, almost pleasant, once you get used to the smell of those who passed through before you, and the immutable truth that there is no going forward or anywhere else    ... Translated from the Bosnian

Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners with an arc of piss, and then—until he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,” incanting a doggerel prayer about God the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and she, if loose in the halls, would join him, squatting in the center of the room and masturbating with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why they were sent to the madhouse: this is what they needed to do once in the madhouse: this is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion there, created from the few, make-do materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago: her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers (for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session), nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom; the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet; endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose, in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise. One dusk, one vividly contusion-color dusk, with my fists in my pockets and a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window (Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in: a full-grown pig was splayed on the table, stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife, and then they both scooped out a tumble of many dozens of wasps, preserved by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I see it? From inside this, over their wrists in the tripes, they carefully removed the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun and matching brass coin of a moon, and then a child’s-third-grade-version of a house made out of pallid wax: a square of walls, a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations (For Elizabeth Bishop) Dedication Lowell’s poem is modeled on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo,” which Bishop had dedicated to Lowell. Nautilus Island’s Nautilus Island’s Lowell once remarked, “The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town.” hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she’s in her dotage she’s in her dotage Echoes “the world is in its dotage”, from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield(1766). . Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season’s ill— we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill A red fox stain covers Blue Hill Lowell wrote, “The red fox stain was merely meant to describe the rusty reddish color of autumn on Blue Hill, a Maine mountain near where we were living.” . And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet’s filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he’d rather marry. One dark night One dark night Echoes The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic (1542-1591). In his talk “On ‘Skunk Hour,’” Lowell stated, "I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross's poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostic. An existential night.” , my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull hill’s skull "When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus" (Luke: 23:33, NRSV). Both "Golgotha,” in Hebrew, and "Calvary," from Latin ("Calvaria") mean "skull". ; I watched for love-cars I watched for love-cars "watching the lovers was not mine, but from an anecdote about Walt Whitman in his old age" The notes in Robert Lowell: Selected Poems(2006) explains the anecdote: "In the early 1970s, Elizabeth Bishop told Frank Bidart that the source of the anecdote was Logan Pearsall Smith's Unforgotten Years(1939): Almost every afternoon my father would take Walt Whitman driving in the Park; it was an unfailing interest to them to drive as close as they could behind buggies in which pairs of lovers were seated, and observe the degree of slope towards each other, or "buggy-angle," as they called it, of these couples; and if ever they saw this angle of approximation narrowed to an embrace, my father and Walt Whitman, who had ever honored that joy-giving power of nature symbolized under the name of Venus, would return home with happy hearts. (p. 99) . Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves shelves Slopes down on the town. . . . My mind’s not right. A car radio bleats, “Love, O careless Love. . . .” “Love, O careless Love. . . . “A popular blues song of the time written by W.C. Handy and performed by Bessie Smith (1925), in which the narrator threatens to kill his or her wayward lover. The song was performed with slight variations of lyrics by many musicians before Lowell wrote this poem in 1959, including Fats Domino (1956). I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell I myself am hell An echo of Satan speaking in John Milton's Paradise Lost: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (Book 4, line 75) ; nobody’s here— only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spar Nautical term for a mast spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air— a mother skunk with her column column Figuratively, a military formation of kittens swills the garbage pail She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

something scrambled out of me at least I thought it was out of me it could have been into me very fast very sly dirty breath’d assassin spiders ants                earthworms I witnessed being dissected by my brothers and crane flies I tried but never managed to capture whole   such fey stupid wings and legs left drifting on walls mostly I was a witness mostly I’ve kept out of  the way with my hood zipped up to my chin what is the surest thing we know? that as we grow older we think less of killing things and more of coming back who knows where we acquire our knowledge from our mothers   aunts perhaps they pass it on like a candle through an ancient pockmarked door something parenthetic like a clasp broken     useless as a rotten wick a spider climbing the sublime coast of  your shoulders walking through those rooms again a web breaking on the back of  your hand