Scullery Maid

I scrabble at the outskirts of your life,
Your scullery maid of sorts,
I wash your clothes and dishes, feed you
and provide you companionship when
you ring your tiny bell,
You are the sick old woman in the West Wing
of the mansion,
and I am continuously scraping up the remains of
your humanity,
Your mess and your miserable life,
I used to try valiantly to be part of your world,
To be a piece of your happiness,
But you shove a dustpan in my hand and
force me to sweep myself from the corners
of your crumbling life,
As if I don't exist,
As if I never really were here at all,
I suppose this is your way of coping with life,
At least - that's what your pitiful excuse for a therapist
would have said...but what did she ever know...

Ravings

3:20 am in the largest cities in the world,
Who sleeps in them, I always wonder,
Who sleeps at this hour that exhales, finally,
the somber breath of the day prior in a thick, hot
expulsion,
Not I,
Not I or any of the other vagabond-artist-mentally-ill type
loons who spend their time circling and cycling in and out
of bars and psychiatric wards where we keep one hand open for a
glass of Jack Daniels and the other for a new medication from
Jesus Christ M.D.
We swallow our pills and shoot up our
veins and babble to our shrinks and don't sleep, forget
to eat, eat too much, hate our fathers, ignore our mothers when they
call Sunday afternoons at 4pm, turn slowly into the broken skulls of
Chatty Cathy dolls, maniacally and hysterically clattering on about
how broken we feel.
Meanwhile Sir Therapist of Yore nods gravely and says it's
marvelous how we are really "feeling our feelings" and we are "much improving"
even though we are piercing our own flesh with needles, visiting the tattoo shops and carving letters, notes, epitaphs and eulogies into our own flesh with whatever sharp objects we can find.
We spin like Mad Hatters on the teacup's saucer in Alice's Wonderland where she's obviously taken too many God forsaken pills and now we're on another of her Bad Trips. Can that woman never learn to just NOT eat the cake and drink the potion? Fuck!
We're waking up in the nuthouse, no idea how we've gotten there, overdosing on knowledge and starving to death emotionally because we're so fucking poor that all we've got is money. We chase men and women and skirts and heels and makeup and TV's and cars and boys and "kiss kiss" the cheek and 'hey how's it going, sexy' and one night stands and three night stands in some seedy hotel before your next botchy suicide attempt because no one, in all of the hospitals can look you in the face, through all of the psycho-babble and just tell you that you matter and that you're loved, which is all you really need to hear anyfuckingway. So you sleep with that person, fuckfest for three days straight, drugs and booze, forget the food, kick them out at the end, sloppy kiss and send em out the damn door - 'bye, darlin', it's been real but ya know how it goes,' and they cuss you out clear to their car. You turn back inside, take the rest of whatever you've got, wait for it to kick in and call the ambulance. Maybe you'll make it - maybe you wont.
When you were a kid they sold you some bullshit about an American Dream. You were brought up in the hood and you got stuck with this shit instead. But whatever. You'll take it you guess.


Sirens as you pass the fuck out.  

Wild

She is wild,
and unkempt,
She washes her hair
in the cold mountain stream
and the inky blackness of night,
Shaking it madly, fiercely,
Droplets of rainwater becoming
stars on the velvet-sky
of her life,
She sleeps beneath the
cosmos,
Nestled in a tree
as if she were but a very tiny
bird,
Stretching, languid,
in the buttercup softness
of morning light,
Her skin is scrubbed free of
civilization by sand, dirt,
grasses - tall and overgrown,
She smells of honeysuckle
and autumn winds,
Lips full and red - as if
nettles had grown beneath her skin, 
She sings with the wolves
and dances upon the nimbus
of freedom,
She speaks every language
except domestication,
She is the wild woman who lives
deep in my bones,
& I am trying to set her free

Falling Apart

     You would think, by now, that I would have consumed enough pills to numb the searing hot pain in my soul. But no.
     You would think after 30 bottles of I-forgot-what-they-were that I would have been able to drown you out, even for just a night, just to get some small reprieve from this. But no.
     You would think that after all this time, the blade wouldn't call to me the way that it does. Brain begging on it's knees, practically prostrate on the floor before me, to let it breathe. The torture killing it slowly. But no.
     You would think that after all of the empty nights with strangers who I used to call friends, that I would have been able to get you off of my mind. But no.


Dreams of you still wake me in the early morning
hours, blissful and bittersweet, ripping
me from slumber,
Only to be reminded that I am alone,
It's like saying goodbye all over again.
Over and over and over, every night,
and while, goodbye may have only
lasted there, in that terminal for you -
it haunts me the way images of your face
haunt me if I stop to breathe for even
a single moment,
So I hold my breath, move & barely sleep,
& sleep? I have forgotten how to
do it properly, love,
I am a woman unraveling at
an alarming rate,
Alarming, even to me,
and unraveling is my most
perfected art form, you see,
I cannot fuck it up even if I tried,
Food doesn't stay down,
Drugs don't last long enough, and
What am I supposed to do now?
The knife in my bag seems so
alluring...
What do I do now....

Priory

& it was there,
kneeling in my soul to the
beauty of the abandoned priory,
the kind of beauty that sucks
the very breath from your throat,
that I realized the bitter truth,


I realized that all I loved
and would love forever
was leaving me -
and I could touch it no more,
at least not in this life,


I looked at you and saw the grief
of my impending departure
immolating your heart,
I decided to beg God just one
more time to let me stay,
'Please just let me stay'
and there, in the whispering
wind through empty, leafless trees,
my answer was whispered,


So I drank you as deeply as
I could,
mouth on yours, palm
cupping your face beneath the
facinorous entanglement of
tree-fingers,
You know the kind, the
ones that only a tornado can
comb through,


& I knew our tornado had only just
begun to pull us apart...

Some Days

I'm sifting through my memories again,
Plucking them from my soul
and trying to keep them vivid
so I don't forget you,


& do you know what it's like
to lose touch with all you see?
What it's like to unwillingly
forget paradise?


I try to touch a time
and place where I remember
being whole,
Whole as I will ever be,
& on good days - I graze the
surface with my fingertips,
Come away with the smell of the sea,
the rushing waves,
the sound of petulant rain,
the taste of meat pies
and the feeling of savouring a
pasty, half-hearted, before a
cathedral so breathtaking
that it's beauty had stood the test of time
for thousands of years,
and wondering, absent-minded,
if our love would stand that test, too,


Some days I am not
so vividly fortunate,
Some days I can barely recall the
tiny laugh lines that etched themselves
into your face and continued
to etch deeper the longer we entwined
in time,


I aged you, I know,
Burned my cosmic fingerprint
on your eyes and around your mouth
every time you laughed or smiled,
I hope you don't regret it,
I never will,
I hope even when you're old
and covered with a hundred more
lines and wrinkles -
You think of me...and remember
I marked you first,
Marked you as my very own...

Addict

The pills drop into
my veins one milligram at a
time like water sizzling over
dry ice,
Fog bubbles up from my
blood, swirling in my
brain and for a moment,
finally,
I am at peace,


Petulant shrieks of disordered
mind are sated and placated
with little white spheres,
I sweat insecurities as I sleep
that soak my sheets and matte
hair onto furrowed brow,
I awaken, slick and dizzy
with addiction,


Fumble for my bedside wine,
Sip it to quench my need for
glorious oblivion,
Dropping myself into the perfect
miserable high, steady and eternal,


I am avoiding it - this
gruesome truth that I desperately run
to avoid,
You're not coming
and I am not coming back,


I think if I had known, before,
I would have waited, on
that beautiful, perfect beach day,
until your back was turned,


...and then slipped myself quietly into the ocean,


I would have floated on the
waves, sunshine beaming down on me,
thought about your face,


and just let the water's soft swish and
sway rock me to blissful sleep,
No pills needed, no gun,
no violent macabre ending,
...just float below the surface
and breathe...


Illumination at it's best...

Intro to Dissociation

     My body grows cold and I lose feeling in all of my extremities. No, I am not dying, though I feel as though maybe I should be. The last time I was this numb I was, truly and unforgivably, dead. As in - no pulse. As in - on the other side of life and laughter and breathing and bleeding and hoping and praying and...whatever else we're supposed to do while the heart beats proud in our chest cavity. Whatever, I was dead. Blissfully numb in the arms of someone in the afterlife.
     I drive down the road, 60 degrees outside and sunny, if I'm lucky. It's April but my emotions still say January. Cold. Lifeless. I try to rummage up some feeling in myself to enjoy the buds falling and billowing on pretty Spring air. I imagine England looks rather lovely, albeit slightly wet, right at this moment in time. Indianapolis is not a fucking picnic. Truth? I hate it here. I always have. The only thing I enjoyed as a kid was watching the airplanes take off and thinking to myself "...someday I'm gonna travel everywhere..." but...you can't watch the planes take off in the back of some one's truck anymore. Thanks Osama, you fucking dead prick. I hope you're burning in hell just for that. What a dick move.
     Back to the present - I'm dead, I think. No, seriously, I think I've died. I think this nightly bottle of wine is pouring down the gullet of a corpse. They say people with mental illness are more prone to substance abuse. I think people with mental illness are just eccentric geniuses who are driven to drink by the stupid fucks who come up with that shit. What am I a genius in? Hell if I know. Sarcasm, perhaps.
     My body literally grows fucking numb. Nothing feels real. I am a dream within a dream. They call it: Dissociation. Basically, it means I have checked the fuck out. Do you think I say fuck a lot? You will soon. My mind, being overridden with anxiety, emotional pain, angst, what-the-fuck-ever, decides "No, you're in time out. I'm taking away all of your senses. Go sit with your new friend amnesia."
     I hate amnesia. I can't even remember what you said five minutes ago while dissociated. I can't remember my SSN, my name, my favourite colour, my mother's maiden name, if I forget a password, I'm basically fucked and have to send in a blood sample to prove who I am so I can check my fucking EMAIL. Shitty, right? It strips me of everything but the flesh-suit that I wear on my bones. Which I also hate. Mostly because it's decided to lose all feeling. You could hit me with a searing hot skillet on my inner thigh and I'd probably just ask you what you're cooking because, gee, I'm American and the scent of any fatty carcass cooking must mean delicious food is on it's merry way. Yippee!
     *Unfinished.

Real

Pixels form together,
Piecing together my memories,
For my own internal one's
have abandoned me again,
Eyes drift over places,
faces,
things...
things I should remember
with vivid, brilliant certainty,


Such a strange land
in the abyss of my mind,
As if someone had told me
that I were a foreigner
to my own soul,
That it knows me not,
That I am but passing strange,


How odd to be so alien
to oneself,
to be so weird in one's own eyes
that you lose the ability
to recognize and decode them,
Do they sparkle?
No.
Do they shine?
No.


They are dead,
dead like the memories that
I cannot grasp,


Sylvia said it best
"I think I made you up
inside my head,"
and truly, I do,
Were you ever really real?
Were you just another one of
the delusions...
hallucinations that they swear I am prone
to?


Was I real
back there, in that place?
Just tell me this
if you cannot tell me
another thing,
Was I real?
Was I ever?

Ethereal Love

You must have known
that I was dying from the lack
of you,
That you existed only
in the ethereal cords that spun
from my core like candy floss,
Dancing like sea waves tossing
themselves upon a breeze,
You must have known that I was
here,
always,
Eyes glued to your translucent,
glorious face and darkened eyes,
Watching you form in my mind
alone,
Knowing in your mind that you
could never come to stay,
Could never suck at the same air as I,
Knowing we would never drink
in a gorgeous summers day like wine,
Intoxicated and infuriated with a maddened
sense of glee,
Lips and tongues spitting
the fire of brilliance like
I had always hoped,
You must have known,
& you must have known that I
would have stayed, there, in
Wonderland with you,
body rotting away to ash,
Until there was nothing left
of me in the physical realm,
Until I was ethereal, too,


For one fine day, as I gazed upon you while
my body was being broken in the
physical realms,
You grabbed the cord, smiled at me,
and sliced us apart,
& I screamed as this realm sucked me
back down into hell,
To the room where they told me you could
never come to stay,
To the room where my body, and spirit,
lay broken for a long time,
But, you must have known,


Some days I swear I hear you,
feel you,
sense you,
& I try to touch you with my
talismans, but,
they never do reach you,
wherever you are,


I am alive,
not okay,
but alive,


But I'm sure you already know...

Social Phobic

Thoughts, 

     Do I have a coherent string of those anymore? Has the Topamax jumbled my thoughts and stripped the foyer of my skull temple so bare that even the monks of sanity are having a rough go of it, here of late? It feels that way. Up is down. Down is west. West is where we want to be. Sunshine and endless, glorious, balmy, summertime for days and days. Who wouldn't want that, though? Maybe those folk who don't fare well in the heat. People who were made for the snow. I always did think they were a bit off somehow. Strong and resilient, yes, but how on earth do they not suffer depression of the darkest sorts? Strange…

     Anxiety is the name of the game - flat out. Just another round of medicines and supplements to help cut off the venom-drenched mummy wrappings that wrap around every single damn nerve. When you try to snip the wrong one - they all go off like a bomb, and explode by tightening around their nerves and soaking them in the venom. Leaving me to devolve and writhe on the floor like the sub-human creature that I really think that I am. Anxiety…is such a fucking bitch. 

     I feel lost. I can't work. People scare me. Phones scare me. If I could work a job that required  minimal human contact, like data entry without phones, I could do it. I would never speak, hardly. Just get up, go to work, come home, eat dinner. Go to bed. Pampering would happen on weekends. I have to find a job. I'm afraid that I won't. I'm afraid I will ruin everything that is going so amazingly well in my life right now because of this godforsaken disease. I can't make people understand that I am so insanely afraid of people at times that I would rather take over a shift as a beekeeper. I'm phobic of bees. The beekeeper has a spray that keeps the bees calm plus he has protective gear. He's protected. 

     In a job, a regular, "real," job - I am not protected and my mind KNOWS this. Anything could happen. It terrifies me. I am terrified of failure. I am terrified of people. I am terrified of everything. I'm just terrified. I am afraid of working. I am afraid. I do and do not know all the reasons why. 

…Why???

What then?

If the warmth of the early summer
comes along,
Whipping at the hairs around
my throat and neck,
& your own mouth does not
vie for the attention of
the flesh surrounding there,

What does that mean?

If the stars in the sky
react like popping candy
in the mouth of God,
but your laughter does not
intermingle with my own,
somewhere,
anywhere,
beneath that dome
together,

What does that mean?

If, when I drive,
going sixty down Kentucky Road,
sun hung low in the sky,
the warm summer air whips at the hair
at my neck and atop my head,
& I cackle gleefully at some funny thought
in my mildly macabre mind,
and you are not there to kiss my
fleshy throat,
and you are not there to laugh along with
me in the cacophonous noise of music on the
wind,

…then…?

If I'm to meet you on a balcony in a posh
California home,
Will you meet me at the end of that walk to the rim,
or will I walk on until I lunge forward into street below?
& if I am to see you on the beach, will you actually be
there - hands touching my forearm slightly,
eyes glittering, smiling, overjoyed that I made it with you,
Or - when I arrive to the Sea that day, drenched in driving rain,
will I just let go and
will I just keep walking on until salt water fills my soul?

Societal Boundaries

Nothing sucks as much

as the day you relalize 

you're just another fucking 

statistic, 

Another blip of red on the chart, 

Another speck of dust in the 

eye of society, 

But fuck society, right?

What the hell do they matter…?