69 Mental health poems

St. Joseph’s Hospital, Tacoma WA, 1969-74. A headache makes your mouth plunge, then it pulls away. The smell of diesel or the smell of rain. Now you are a thick suburb. Under the pressure of a credit card. Your body is a box of mirrors, a mercury mine. You have blossomed and spread, white mystery of spring. All your blood and treasure is spent. O rose, you are sick. The morning rain does not nourish you. Your mouth is caught in a rigid O. Where only deficit is at home. You stand beneath a white hospital, almost drunk. You cannot say why your sense is drenched: exhaustion or debt. What’s the difference again? A braid of eyes. Curtains the color of a dove’s wing. Ceramic lips framed against seismic shatter. “Soft zone.” Meanwhile your uncle is dying in San Francisco and you do not know it. You are standing in front of another hospital whose patients are strangers. You unwind a rope of carbon so that you can post pictures of it on the internet. How much damage does your life do and how can you refuse? O rose, you are sick. Only injury sustains you.

His head rose like a torch in a tomb. Banquet-style, as at a second Symposium, The others lounged on couches or lay knocked out. A net of shadows dangled from wire-meshed windows. Buffeted there, there, some swam against currents Or were swept off into underwater canyons. Visitors, confusion streaming over them, speech Foaming into eddies, words lolling like jetsam On the lightless bottom, listened to the news Of minds crammed in bodies: Here, all was stoic Or hectic or unspeaking disconnection. Moving shadows on the TV screen implied A world out there, though a world more couth, More uncouth? in four o’clock’s slushy freezing dark: Plato’s cave loomed in semblance of the walls, Only wasn’t it the cave as All, no outside Not inside, nothing more real to go out into? He peered far down to where dark swam up From the depthless screen and hovered poised Above dark-in-light: Sergeant Schultz kept repeating, “I know nothing, nothing,” his funny-Nazi German accent As he recoils from his ever sauve tormentor, the American POW Colonel Hogan who threatens Schultz With good-humored ruthlessness as bad as a mother In a supermarket aisle cajoling her greedy-eyed child, “Ah ah ah—remember the Russian front!” —Poor Schultz’s accent making him more human in his terror, Though only an actor acting his lines through The canned laughter’s bacchic furor sweeping down The corridor to die in murmurs of slippers shushing. Cast yourself in it, imagine having to say those lines, Not just now, but always, eternity a chaos Of laugh-track frenzy more demonic than funny, Reruns of Hogan haunted by the actor Who acts Hogan’s lines, his real-life orgies Before a secret camera ending in his Glogotha, His infamy to be bludgeoned and found wrapped Naked in a shower curtain that hangs In the mind like the cave’s walls turning outside Inside outside inside no end or difference inside out —The almost see-through membrane of a world gone flat: He hunches forward to change the channel. Muttering something to Schultz’s “I know nothing, nothing,” A grim joke maybe, “Ain’t that the truth...” though really, Who could know what words he was or wasn’t Answering, who can hear above the roar of Earth moving under him, trying to throw him off As he clings to the sofa hurtling through space! And as he clings, the screen slowly opens and fans out wide Around the National Broadcasting Corporation peacock Waving its plumes, flaming blues, greens, radiant vermilions, Brilliance of the seasons, late-morning pastels Easy and restful for the brain and eye, Sempiternal hues Atlantis rose up and sank back into. And these feather off into grays, solid wintry Grays that give off nothing and reflect nothing back.

This is a demon that can take a grown brain and squash it to sponge. There is no loving the state of a decrepit mind that encourages a decrepit body. Is he sleeping or just not there? States of awareness flicker inside a gauzy lens. We’ve seen this before—in a film, the man disappearing as he stands right there, his body stolid. Let’s say this man worked as an Assistant Principal and admired his own IQ. Let’s say this man had a brutish body but was not a brute. All of this becomes portraiture but there can be fractures of truth.  Looking at him you think:Am I in this film or is this a vapory memory?

It is the way I breathe through chronic terrifying ferns through a black ungracious stoma it is this uranium rejoinder this impact pointing backwards & when witnessed causes observers to panic to blur & forget & to flee they can’t see my approach my wayward dorsal looming my lettering in black drizzle it is my approach my weaving my sigil as curved embankment therefore I can never name myself or plot myself according to the sparks or the splinters from the work bench dazed ruthless with salivation with my awkward insular roaming I am like a few darkened eaglets riveted against the moon then I am brought to a table by deafness feasting with herons which spins me by embranglement by in-circular abatement always seeking to have me neutered beneath my derma so as to talk to myself so as to cancel my structureless scrutiny they speak of me as lawless as despicable as a typhoon in a sea well as to morals as to fixed & accelerated combination they fix me as deserted bereft as a fragment from a starving lion’s compendium I am considered as pointless positron without image as hieroglyph as sundial as martyr being leakage from a barbarous index province

make you aching upwards of a teenage broken phone come to hear underwater libraries up the side of the dinner plate a little too fast not ungrateful like some of  these bastards around here can’t tap out a tune with you looking away genies of not enough sleep a happier location for the war not the easiest thing you realize beautiful architecture refreshing beverages our signs read hello love us for

Welcome to your day of sanity! Come in and close the door it will likely lock behind you and you will be home alone waste disposal will take care of your needs : at long last undisturbed phenomena without the heavy metal background of the street will be yours for observation and response : do you have visions? do you think? Your mouth do you open it for more than medication? I should know I know that I should know : we’ve watched centuries erode the fortress drain the moat the poet’s clumsy beast has reached its home and prey we wither 
in the gridlock of our power only the guns remain and are in use pure accident is beauty to be glimpsed your trembling only further clouds your sight I in my home you in your other place harmonize 
the fading anthem of an age the cracked bell of our liberty keeps time a penny for the corpse you left behind keep on recycling all that you have heard before call it a double bind much like the dead bolt that locked the door that keeps you safe and sane : ho — hum — harry who? oh that’s just a phrase found in a time capsule capped and sealed and shot up in the air : no I cannot tell you where it fell to earth that page was torn out years ago it’s chance that we have a fragment of that language left : do your archaeology before a mirror the canyons and the barren plains are clear but where to dig for a ruined golden age a fiction we were served with breakfast flakes say have you forgot this day of sanity? No problem the heavy key was thrown away as soon as the door was closed and locked you’re safe : some day the asylum may be torn down to make way for a palace of the mad it does not follow that anything will change : choose your executioner by lot almost 
everyone is trained and competent there are different schools of course check out degrees fees can become an issue of your choice and some may be in service or abroad as usual nothing’s simple it’s all a part of the grand unraveling that must take place before the new line can be introduced : prepare now don’t be shocked when the music starts the year’s fashions may feature pins and nails.

When I fall asleep, and even during sleep, I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial, Having no relation to my affairs. Dear Mother, is any time left to us In which to be happy? My debts are immense. My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment. I know nothing. I cannot know anything. I have lost the ability to make an effort. But now as before my love for you increases. You are always armed to stone me, always: It is true. It dates from childhood. For the first time in my long life I am almost happy. The book, almost finished, Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust. Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me. Satan glides before me, saying sweetly: “Rest for a day! You can rest and play today. Tonight you will work.” When night comes, My mind, terrified by the arrears, Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence, Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.” Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself With the same resolution, the same weakness. I am sick of this life of furnished rooms. I am sick of having colds and headaches: You know my strange life. Every day brings Its quota of wrath. You little know A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems, The most fatiguing of occupations. I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me. I write from a café near the post office, Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes, The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write “A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write “A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart? Although it costs you countless agony, Although you cannot believe it necessary, And doubt that the sum is accurate, Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

The mind’s black kettle hisses its wild exigencies at every turn: The hour before the coffee and the hour after. Penscratch of the gone morning, woman a pitched hysteria watching the mad-ant scramble, her small wants devouring. Her binge and skin-thrall. Her old selves being shuffled off into labyrinths, this birdless sky a longing. Her moth-mouth rabble unfacing touch-and-go months under winter, torn letters under floorboards, each fickle moon pecked through with doubt. And one spoiled onion. Pale Cyclops on her kitchen counter now sprouting green missives, some act of contrition; neighbor-god’s vacuum a loud rule thrown down. Her mother now on the line saying too much. This island is not a martyr. You tinker too much with each gaunt memory, your youth and its unweeding. Not everything blooms here a private history — consider this immutable. Consider our galloping sun, its life. Your starved homesickness. The paper wasp kingdom you set fire to, watched for days until it burnt a city in you. Until a family your hands could not save became the hurricane. How love is still unrooting you. And how to grow a new body — to let each word be the wild rain swallowed pure like an antidote. Her mother at the airport saying don’t come back. Love your landlocked city. Money. Buy a coat. And even exile can be glamorous. Some nights she calls across the deaf ocean to no one in particular. No answer. Her heart’s double-vault a muted hydra. This hour a purge of  its own unselfing. She must make a home of it.

That dream of a cricket in the dark of the night at the foot of the gallows tree. Virtuous cricket. Little, hopeful heart- shaped face lit up by the moon. Little, hopeful, insistent song about the future sung to a hanged man’s boots.

To the Metropolitan Police Force, London: the asylum gates are locked and chained, but undone by wandering thoughts and the close study of maps. So from San Francisco, patron city of tramps, I scribble this note, having overshot Gloucester by several million strides, having walked on water. City of sad foghorns and clapboard ziggurats, of snakes-and-ladders streets and cadged cigarettes, city of pelicans, fish bones and flaking paint, of underfoot cable-car wires strained to breaking point    ... I eat little — a beard of grass, a pinch of oats — let the salt-tide scour and purge me inside and out, but my mind still phosphoresces with lightning strikes and I straddle each earthquake, one foot either side of the fault line, rocking the world’s seesaw. At dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge is heaven’s seashore: I watch boats heading home with the day’s catch or ferrying souls to glittering Alcatraz, or I face west and let the Pacific slip in bloodshot glory over the planet’s lip, sense the waterfall at the end of the journey. I am, ever your countryman, Ivor Gurney.