Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but you’ve actually been planted.
Christine Caine
mental health
A Lovely Madness
poetryIt’s lovely to think
that the mind has been healed,
that it works like everyone else’s,
until you realize
that you can never be healed
because your body opens new wounds
of its own accord
and applies half-hearted bandages
in a patchwork attempt
to seem normal.
It is lovely to think that
madness is beautiful,
craziness is kind,
until it turns painful
when it shatters your mind.
oasis
poetrySometimes the words come freely,
a flash flood that flows
for weeks on end –
fed by the tears that trail
down the pale cheeks of loneliness.
Other times, the words are trapped;
tangled in cords of decay and rot –
until they are suffocated,
buried and forgotten
among the other things I safely destroyed.
The Executioner
poetryThere is a space the length
of a small child's pinky;
a space that is harder to cross
than the harshest of rapids,
or the coldest of winters.
Unless you have needed to cross it,
unless you have tried to squeeze
the two sides together like
a pair of two clashing magnets,
it does not exist.
This space is the purgatory of being;
where you are stuck between
what you want,
and what your mind, your body,
allows you to do.
This space is the inch of room
between a guillotines blade and the
wisps of hair on your head.
One side a release, and one
a reminder of what is normal,
what is expected.
For this space is only rented to
the melancholic;
to those who have felt
the cold and nimble hands of apathy,
the wry smile of despair.
Those hands and smiles
lead you to the gallows;
to the inch of death rope,
the space of an empty pill bottle,
or to the space between your skin
and the green veins
you wish so desperately to slit.
Nocturne
poetry
Over time,
her mouth became
a string instrument
tightened with the tension
of constraining her words.
Measures between her laughs
and ivory smiles grew longer,
each beat of silence
lingering for just
a note too long.
More often than not,
tired sandpaper lids scrape
against the white expanse
of her eyes, exposing the
red vein strings
hiding beneath;
they turn the half note circles
below into shades
of a minor key.
At night,
her heart thrums to the rhythm
of a staccato symphony:
rising, rising, rising,
as if her conductor brain
commands it -
faster, faster, faster.
Frantic thoughts
create a polyphonic sound
of worry and dejection -
melodic harmonies to the
hasty trills within her
xylophone ribcage
These sounds echo
in the acoustics of her skull
like the clicks
of an
off
beat
metronome.
Prompt: “Write about a change you have noticed in your lifetime, but write only about the things that embody or illustrate this change. It might be a change you have noticed in a friendship, in the body of a loved one, in your hometown…” (Pagh 79)
exulansis 