69 Mental health poems

"Yesterday the bird of night did sit, Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace, Hooting and shrieking." —William Shakespeare 1. Imagine waking to a scene of snow so new not even memories of other snow can mar its silken surface. What other innocence is quite like this, and who can blame me for refusing to violate such whiteness with the booted cruelty of tracks? 2. Though I cannot leave this house, I have memorized the view from every window— 23 framed landscapes, containing each nuance of weather and light. And I know the measure of every room, not as a prisoner pacing a cell but as the embryo knows the walls of the womb, free to swim as its body tells it, to nudge the softly fleshed walls, dreading only the moment of contraction when it will be forced into the gaudy world. 3. Sometimes I travel as far as the last stone of the path, but every step, as in the children's story, pricks that tender place on the bottom of the foot, and like an ebbing tide with all the obsession of the moon behind it, I am dragged back. 4. I have noticed in windy fall how leaves are torn from the trees, each leaf waving goodbye to the oak or the poplar that housed it; how the moon, pinned to the very center of the window, is like a moth wanting only to break in. What I mean is this house follows all the laws of lintel and ridgepole, obeys the commandments of broom and of needle, custom and grace. It is not fear that holds me here but passion and the uncrossable moat of moonlight outside the bolted doors.

when i look at my life i feel like bursting into tears marriage and mental illness vintage washed michael jackson graphic spiritual disco grieving ritual sell your body to your horse-eyed past little fictions somebody got to sing and somebody got to play the squaw last time i saw him last time i saw my honey buried your dead lack of afro exit wounds cut off whole limbs of generational desire the death of cleopatra hell or high water get some fucking love in your life girl ghost chant you’ve got to die if you want to live amidst and against the things we are rubbed into the cloth wrapped around their faces now white men are black men too the ways we can’t say no i call you queen not as a term of endearment but as a reminder our histories meet on the inside we all be black moses slave for the river same river twice sometimes have to emphasize the brown part hey there beautiful brown girl we don't usually change until things are so painful that we must

So it has come to this – insomnia at 3:15 A.M., the clock tolling its engine like a frog following a sundial yet having an electric seizure at the quarter hour. The business of words keeps me awake. I am drinking cocoa, the warm brown mama. I would like a simple life yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box. It is my immortality box, my lay-away plan, my coffin. All night dark wings flopping in my heart. Each an ambition bird. The bird wants to be dropped from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge. He wants to light a kitchen match and immolate himself. He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo and come out painted on a ceiling. He wants to pierce the hornet’s nest and come out with a long godhead. He wants to take bread and wine and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean. He wants to be pressed out like a key so he can unlock the Magi. He wants to take leave among strangers passing out bits of his heart like hors d’oeuvres. He wants to die changing his clothes and bolt for the sun like a diamond. He wants, I want. Dear God, wouldn’t it be good enough just to drink cocoa? I must get a new bird and a new immortality box. There is folly enough inside this one.

Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms; by this means patients are enabled in their symptoms to represent not merely their own experiences, but the experiences of a great number of other persons, and can suffer, as it were, for a whole mass of people, and fill all the parts of a drama by means of their own personalities alone. — Sigmund Freud Anne identified with Cate until it became a bona fide illness, for Boris had left Cate, resulting not only in psychic estrangement but an unconscious stream of hostility directed not at Boris, but at his new woman, Anne, whom Cate viewed as her rival. Cate remained excessively tender with Boris, though Cate, for him, had been a “totem animal” from which he gained power by “eating.” Whereas Boris was the patriarch, Anne was the ego alien; and whereas Cate was Anne’s fixation, Anne was no one’s obsession, so she was admitted to a psychiatric ward with the unbidden associations she could not be induced to abandon. On the rare occasions she slept, the manifest and latent content of her dreams was the dance of abandonment between Boris and Cate, which Anne, in her waking hours, projected onto the walls, as though screening a silent film. She could not be induced to abandon this footage; she could not be induced to abandon her object love of Boris (whose own object choice was his ego-libido); or her identification with Cate, who felt no friendship towards Anne. Soon Anne drew a mental triangle on every surface she saw, be it phallic or concave, and sometimes this triangle was isosceles, sometimes it was equilateral, and often it was right.

1 Meanwhile the expressway’s hum, it roars into Her, the expressway cargo and tree-lined, stretched Radio towers, mowers its horns and hogs, its beef And bread vans, hour after hour, laptop, radar Detectors from New Mexico, Idaho potatoes, HoHos And Cheetos, all organic grain-fed, pieces of chicken, Pieces of cow, slices of pig, kernals of corn, diced carrot, All packaged meals, she of drums, her mile after mile Of interchange escape into itself rest stop, progress Is welcoming and bidding adieu, states drinking Her progress, passing tolls, Motel 6 she hum as glass And EconoLodge, passing itself traces of Ashland And Peoria, Willingboro, Paterson, every inch of it grafted, Numbered, planted, barriered, mowed, guardrailed, O my citizen consumers, for the time, infinite, Replaceable, scaling these walls of sound and motion, Dipping in, expressing oneself, expressing oneself, Expressing oneself. 2 Wonder warships at citizens in blue, the number Lining the leaf, infinite expressways, and scaling Blood, soil a Camden, shouting over water Sunday Steel passing the in and sky noise, another abandoned By of one to mills, at steel, above bone, gazing (euphoria, Nostalgia!) citizens, up leaf, citizens, wonder! Infinite warships Sunday and abandoned a shouting expressways, noise, Across in blood, steel, lining passing bone, at gazing Blue mills, scaling the water another number to in The above soil by of steel up one and sky at the Over Camden, citizens, euphoria nostalgia! All along the avenue spronging, tent-like, their attitudes Way ahead of them. My computer screen, waving.Where Is your horse? she said, and there was nothing I could say. What I want is generally tidy. What I get often can’t dance. What wants a date who can’t dance? Who wants a line without rhythm? Who wants a line without thought? 3 Occasionally there is anger. Occasionally she takes her one good foot and applies it to surfaces otherwise flat and safe, the expressway progressing itself through her, expressly. (I live here because the country I once lived in is now a corporate washroom, where there were once gardens now oil refineries turn night into day and farmers into militiamen—you won’t even understand this, and your teeth gleam!) Once again the feeling comes, like a sprong in the groin, an abundance of feeling that is sharp, almost hostile in its need to overtake. Several women in pink felt it coming. They turned, their pierced ears like arrows in her thigh. Sprong, sarong. I ask you? Over the course of several weeks developers wiped out all the trees in a town in A to avoid having them designated as essential sites after a rare woodpecker was found to be nesting in the town. Woodpeckers are not essential. Trees are not essential. Trees are ornamental. Humanity is ornamental. Prophet is everything. This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice. Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi. Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.

today was a quiet day not good not bad just quiet which is different from numb quiet is okay quiet means the volume turned down not the signal gone

I take a pill every morning that makes the mornings possible i'm not ashamed of it the same people who would be also take ibuprofen for headaches the logic is the same

You can't see what's wrong that's the problem they have with it but they also can't see your liver and they believe in that just fine

Today was hard not in a way i can explain not in a way that makes sense to most people just hard like carrying something heavy all day without being able to put it down