69 Mental health poems

She’s sitting at my little desk, drinking decaf. How’d she get back in? Where’s her blind man gone? (I pray he’s gone— though the desk needs tuning.) What door was unlocked? They all seemed bastioned. I sight through the crack. That’s my favorite cup, with the bite out of it. She’s writing one of my poems. Just who’s sitting at that desk, playing me? Shrubbery, thrashing to get in, lines all panes, long windows split in parallels. My windows set out on separate expeditions. They never meet, no matter how far extended.

Not unusual, to have therapy only one night a week, to have a professional to talk to about personal problems. Evening would be a typical time, after work. It might require traveling there by public transportation, in a city where few people have cars, and taxis have become expensive in the past few years. Some movies have a scene where a character in the movie is tapping on a wall, along a bookshelf, then suddenly, the wall slides aside. Therapists can let their clients in by buzzing a button, if they’re in a private office they don’t share with any colleagues. The wall may have ornamental architectural devices trimming it, but those stay in place when it moves and slides aside. If one client arrives before the previous session is finished, he or she has to wait in a waiting area. He can put his hands on his lap, palms down on his thighs. Upon first seeing it, you don’t realize that there is another room, a corridor, hidden behind the wall. They must suspect that there is a secret panel, because there they are tapping on the wall. They hold an ear near the wall and tap it with two fingers. The later client may see the previous client leaving, therapist shaking his or her hand goodbye, “Until next week,” and the client could develop feelings about this weekly exchange, might feel jealousy. The actors in the movie could then go inside the hidden room or secret corridor behind the sliding panel and escape from some deadly danger that has been threatening.

It sat between my husband and my children. A place was set for it—a plate of greens. It had been there: I had seen it But not somehow—but this was like a dream— Not seen it so that I knew I saw it. It was as if I could not know I saw it Because I had never once in all my life Not seen it. It was an eland. An eland!That is why the children Would ask my husband, for a joke, at Christmas: “Father, is it Donner?” He would say, “No, Blitzen.” It had been there always. Now we put silver At its place at meals, fed it the same food We ourselves ate, and said nothing. Many times When it breathed heavily (when it had tried A long useless time to speak) and reached to me So that I touched it—of a different size And order of being, like the live hard side Of a horse’s neck when you pat the horse— And looked with its great melting tearless eyes Fringed with a few coarse wire-like lashes Into my eyes, and whispered to me So that my eyes turned backward in their sockets And they said nothing— many times I have known, when they said nothing, That it did not exist. If they had heard They could not have been silent. And yet they heard; Heard many times what I have spoken When it could no longer speak, but only breathe— When I could no longer speak, but only breathe. And, after some years, the others came And took it from me—it was ill, they told me— And cured it, they wrote me: my whole city Sent me cards lilac-branches, mourning As I had mourned— and I was standing By a grave in flowers, by dyed rolls of turf, And a canvas marquee the last brown of earth. It is over. It is over so long that I begin to think That it did not exist, that I have never— And my son says, one morning, from the paper: “An eland. Look, an eland!” —It was so. Today, in a German dictionary, I saw elend And the heart in my breast turned over, it was— It was a word one translates wretched. It is as if someone remembered saying: “This is an antimacassar that I grew from seed,” And this were true. And, truly, One could not wish for anything more strange— For anything more. And yet it wasn’t interesting.  .  . —It was worse than impossible, it was a joke. And yet when it was, I was— Even to think that I once thought That I could see it to feel the sweat Like needles at my hair-roots, I am blind —It was not even a joke, not even a joke. Yet how can I believe it? Or believe that I Owned it, a husband, children? Is my voice the voice Of that skin of being—of what owns, is owned In honor or dishonor, that is borne and bears— Or of that raw thing, the being inside it That has neither a wife, a husband, nor a child But goes at last as naked from this world As it was born into it— And the eland comes and grazes on its grave. This is senseless? Shall I make sense or shall I tell the truth? Choose either—I cannot do both. I tell myself that. And yet it is not so, And what I say afterwards will not be so: To be at all is to be wrong. Being is being old And saying, almost comfortably, across a table From— from what I don’t know— in a voice Rich with a kind of longing satisfaction: “To own an eland! That’s what I call life!”

Oh, dangling long sleeves in the Mercurochrome. Parking her punch on her knees. I’m not a joiner. In the night, a visitation, small as a thumb, enters the sealed house and ascends. Mother wouldn’t have stood for that long. Drippy-drooping around on heels. Leaving the blue cheese out.

They perched on roofs and fences and sills. They posed statue-still on catenary lines. They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. They amassed en masse on the cemetery lawn and marauded the broad, yawning fields like cattle. Their cackles were black. Each shadow dove and pecked. They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. They worked in shifts. Clocked out at odd hours. They laid their eggs in the V s of trees. They teemed on the dry-baked banks of creek beds, streams the sun had overseen. They teetered on the bed-knob tops of flagpoles. They pitched like pennies into founts. They pitched like babies into wells. They thumped at doors then skulked away like hoodlum teens. They jabbed her. When she cried they did it faster. Everyone knows what happened next. Some grew big as sunflower stalks, others tall like bonfire flames. Or moving vans. Or the sick, brick houses people die inside of every night. Their hatchlings canopied the sky. Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat? Or wormed between her legs in bad-man ways? Or rattled plumes and whooped and beat her body with their wings? Or locked their talons to her thighs and tra-la-la-ed that ditty from the old-time music box? Or forced their whiskies past her lips? Or put her in the pillory? This was foreplay, in a way. They rolled in rabid packs and woofed like dogs. She couldn’t throw a bone. The meat was gone. They chased her and they named her and they boiled her tears and bathed her. Then they ate her.

I. She thinks the monkey's bad luck because of all the Institutions it's seen. A curious curious George hooked to my hoodie, with arguably racialized, inappropriate lips curling out to smile and greet the staff as I ask for the nth time why no release or where is Albeheary? By now, anything may well prove to be true, which, of course, is insane. II. Sometimes I lose it. If I can't wear it, When I'm on the outside, the backpack Or higgly pocket. Little higgly pigglies Tearing at the tongue. Speak to me. Who, art? Thinning. More vodka. This time Lakeshore third floor, My DTs I can't dial. The kindest black Trans/guy who did my dialing for me. Others tore their hair out or hanged themselves. My roomie he collapsed his lung Eleven times. This is his last trip to the place. Eventual. Even. They moved me I got the same roommate Last New Year's as the one before. The shakes are permanent. The stain all the more so, like nothing. Inside, a perpetual processing. This is prisoning. Ever emotion's measured. "wrong" (with you) This isn't as or like anything. Outside, I just want back in. III. At one point, there was something to it. As when he found a hernia on me in the tub And suddenly, "operation." Herr Doctor. Then hospital at five years old and a Curious Curious George story. How he went too. Or windup Campbell's Soup. Of course he slept there, for solace. For comfort. Night rounds. Book lernt animal instinct. Aping compassion. Inappropriate lips. The old testament wronged.

I guess you could call it a sort of sympathetic magic. How else to explain this obsessive reorganizing of my home, my books, my papers, my poems, this housekeeping of my hard drive and floppies, all the deleting and casting away of redundancy and obsolescence, dead files and moved-on addresses and the scrubbing, the constant scrubbing and dusting and the howl of the protesting vacuum that struggles to inhale at least the 70% of house-dust that is dead human skin some of which might be hers.

To tell you the truth I’d have thought it had gone out of use long ago; there is something so 19th-century about it, with its absurd reverse Puritanism. Can withdrawal from reality or interpersonal commitment be gauged by uneasiness at being summoned to a small closed room to discuss ambiguously sexual material with a total stranger? Alone in the presence of the grave examiner, it soon becomes clear that, short of strangling yourself, you are going to have to find a way of suppressing the snickers of an eight-year-old sex fiend, and feign cu- riosity about the process to mask your indignation at being placed in this situation. Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egypt- ian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too. Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pil- lars and swords out of the old brain’s unconscious. You keep finding yourself thinking, “God damn it, don’t tell me that isn’t a pussy!” But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.” The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you’re supposed to be crazy (and are probably proving it). Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn’t hurt your case. Yes, it’s some little card game you’ve gotten yourself into this time, when your only chance is to lose. Fold, and they have got you by the balls— just like the ones you neglected to identify.

I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing from this life, just as my father did. When the pain you're in is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything but your own pain, the rest of the world and all other life don't matter. I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good, their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.

Cinder blocks ripple. A hard lot is suddenly glammed up by an illusion. Cats will slip under chain-link and lap this dirty pool. I want to go there, be gone there, be anything liquid or even topped with barbed tape. But the sky is swept away and I am stuck in a parked car, all limbs attached to the idea of being human. As if sketched by da Vinci. As if stretched across a piece of parchment, I am drawn. Fear circles flesh boxed in by so many tawdry corners: disease, grocery lists, and suchnot. Even my thighs face Vitruvian quandaries: whether to stay together or fall apart. The mental ward is not unappealing: I check my calendar. What’s a lesion in the temporal lobe except an opportunity for time to fall into a black hole? These are clinical terms, time and black hole, words even this century’s doctors will recognize as problematic: both should help me forget but don’t. Heal, deaden. Either way I am a woman who wants to be rid of memory, past and future. Today I desire nothing more than to sit stilled. What’s so rotten about this willing suspension of all inclinations to engage anything other than stasis, brow furrowed, body puddled, hollow? Earlier, I watched a shiny black millipede on turned dirt make progress that could be measured in inches. Perhaps the art of letters is as insubstantial, as oddly disconcerting, and as unwavering. Nothing can be mistaken for resolution, yet the allure of metamorphosis, the way hard things buckle under the line, ameliorates something, at least encourages the generalized slurry of bad thinking to flow into the next available trough. Slop has purpose. This much I know.