69 Mental health poems

the unthinkable prospect of a world in which I am left to my own devices which are few and as soon as the batteries die useless first order of business I draw a map in the sand mark where I stand as the capital of civilization   within me the detailed blueprints of the pyramids and the concept of zero beyond me the finite frontier the many miles of undeveloped shoreline with spectacular views of a sea filled with intricately depicted monsters   I have a lot to do before I introduce the new world to art and astronomy and industry medicine and technology ethics politics democracy by a show of hands we shall elect which tree to burn in the first fire

Dull to myself, and almost dead to these My many fresh and fragrant mistresses; Lost to all music now, since everything Puts on the semblance here of sorrowing. Sick is the land to th' heart, and doth endure More dangerous faintings by her desp'rate cure. But if that golden age would come again And Charles here rule, as he before did reign; If smooth and unperplex'd the seasons were As when the sweet Maria lived here; I should delight to have my curls half drown'd In Tyrian dews, and head with roses crown'd. And once more yet (ere I am laid out dead) Knock at a star with my exalted head.

A.    Use of the lift going up is permitted, provided B.    Use of the lift going down is not permitted, provided C.    Use of the lift going up is D.    Use of the lift going down is not E.    Use of the lift going up F.    Use of the lift going G.    Use of the lift H.    Is      Is not I.    Use J.    U--

Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee and informed the seven of us in his charge his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man he never knew, had been possessed, as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother, born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said, along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair, we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember. As we should also always remember to call him only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive, and never, he warned, by his given nor surname, least of all with the title “Mister” attached, which would remind him of that same most hated father and plunge him therefore into a mood he could not promise he would, he said, “behave appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job, unlike the social difficulties attached thereto, was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads. Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness, this meant not only beer cans and bottles, all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also the occasional condom too, as well as the festering roadkill fresh and ridden with maggotry, or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed into the bed of the township flatbed truck we ourselves rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette. Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston, sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident, in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch of wall we could see through the open door was plastered with fold-outs and pages from every Stump-salvaged Playboy and nudie magazine he had ever found among the wreckage there. Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth. Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known, by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once, while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22 from the rack beside his door and popped with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us, then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out, and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide coat we could see, come the fall, except for school. As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom and Lucy had no use for, on the truck’s dash all that summer Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a tome he said he’d read already eleven times, this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way, it might have had to do with something like the gallery Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title meaning something to us, the last nothing at all. There were things about men we might be unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky. And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat, fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats. The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it, and rats were more common than hares and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed, as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity— the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance of rats the very earth offered up like a plague, the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump, whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox, seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire. Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam, one, after medical school, would hang himself from a beam in his parents’ basement, the others merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory. Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump would spend his last twenty years in prison, having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slug through the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away, balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer, arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump, whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some court-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself, was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country of a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers, in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense, that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.

like a downhill brakes-burned freight train full of pig iron ingots, full of lead life-size statues of Richard Nixon, like an avalanche of smoke and black fog lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal, remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back, faster when you turn to face it, like a fine rain, then colder showers, then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail, fist-size, then jagged laser, shrapnel hail thudding and tearing like footsteps of drunk gods or fathers; it comes polite, loutish, assured, suave, breathing through its mouth (which is a hole eaten by a cave), it comes like an elephant annoyed, like a black mamba terrified, it slides down the valley, grease on grease, like fire eating birds’ nests, like fire melting the fuzz off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute and gorging, never to cease, insatiable, gorging and mute.

I broke at last the terror-fringed fascination that bound my ancient gaze to those crowding faces of plunder and seized my remnant life in a miracle of decision between white- collar hands and shook it like a cheap watch in my ear and threw it down beside me on the earth floor and rose to my feet. I made of their shoulders and heads bobbing up and down a new ladder and leaned it on their sweating flanks and ascended till midair my hands so new to harshness could grapple the roughness of a prickly day and quench the source that fed turbulence to their feet. I made a dramatic descent that day landing backways into crouching shadows into potsherds of broken trance. I flung open long-disused windows and doors and saw my hut new-sept by rainbow brooms of sunlight become my home again on whose trysting floor waited my proud vibrant life.

the bruise will stop by later. For now, the pain pauses in its round, notes the time of day, the patient’s temperature, leaves a memo for the surrogate: What the hell

Open the window and you want to fly out, though you never actually do— I think I see you, still there on the ledge, where I've left you. How pulled-awake and flung can one life be? Again I thought, It will end. Again I promised and clung. I learned there that to cling was in my nature. I think I see you, though you flash quickly through the shutter. I think I hear you, though I sleep. Remember this as a bolero, a finite flaring— both the tulip tree burning in full bloom and the weeping silver birch.

What if   it were possible to vanquish All this shame with a wash of   varnish Instead of wishing the stain would vanish? What if   you gave it a glossy finish? What if   there were a way to burnish All this foolishness, all the anguish? What if   you gave yourself   leave to ravish All these ravages with famished relish? What if   this were your way to flourish? What if   the self   you love to punish — Knavish, peevish, wolfish, sheepish — Were all slicked up in something lavish? Why so squeamish? Why make a fetish Out of everything you must relinquish? Why not embellish what you can’t abolish? What would be left if   you couldn’t brandish All the slavishness you’ve failed to banish? What would you be without this gibberish? What if   the true worth of the varnish Were to replenish your resolve to vanquish Every vain wish before you vanish?

The sober reality Was a double line of orphans in blue smocks Marching above the blue river Under the smoky eye of winter. It is possible to envy them; The picture of which they formed a part Was so well composed, In shades of blue and smoke And the dull brick red of the asylum walls; How orderly and tranquil the effect Of the wintry ranks of children Under the silent sky.