Tag Archives: mental illness

Sep 07 2013
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Fiction, literature, Poetry, Surrealism

Notes of a Devolver

PART ONE

Trepanned girl's skull [3500 BC, Nat.History Museum, Lausanne (Rama)]

Trepanned girl’s skull [3500 BC, Nat.History Museum, Lausanne (Rama)]

SUNDAY

I can’t read the news.
It was easier to understand when I was a boy. Now, the writing seems to be just…words.
People who don’t enjoy what they do – never die. That’s cause they’re never born, they simply exist through life and they hang around like gnats, forever. Doing EVERYTHING, buying EVERYTHING, watching EVERYTHING all the while the grip on their soul gives way and leaves a tattered trail of crisp-withered tears like the leaves in a Twentieth Century autumn. 
Crick! Crick-Crattle, Flip! Crick-Crattle, Flip! That’s the sound of a dying man’s soul turning over, changing color, getting older…

*

I’ve already explained to Nancy that I’m dying. I feel myself slipping, the rot setting in between my teeth, eating away at the edges of my brain. Have you ever seen your bliss deflate like a helium balloon in the bleak corner of a public school gym in a working-class neighborhood which thinks it’s middle class? (to be in the middle is to be wedged-in-between, safe within someone’s sticky pages. The top or the bottom – but never, never the middle…)

*

Monday

The frantic sea of job interviews and emails and…how hard it is now to even look for work. It has gotten physically harder for transients who don’t want to be transients. Yes, I am one of “those” who don’t have a computer!
And the havoc I have brought upon myself: Bold unflinching masochism!

I’m taking up space. I’m a good person and I try hard and look for the goodness in people (and I usually find it much to the chagrin of most people who act ashamed as if I have found out something about them that they would rather not divulge; I realized being “good” irritates people) and am most grateful when others can overlook my sins or faults and can see a shade, a figment of the man I am trying to be.

But I am taking up space.

And I should either add something beautiful to my surroundings or simply give up the air I am breathing because life – no, the anxiety of life – is simply not worth it. I am ashamed to be part of it. And so I had to say, “YES,” when I was asked because -…Well, because I wanted to be able to tell Nancy I had a job and that I was hired and just once share a moment of victory.

The job starts tonight.
And I need this type of job the way I need a hole in the head.

*

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Aug 23 2013
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Books, literature, Poetry Quote

Henry O.Tanner's "Thankful Poor"

Henry O.Tanner’s “Thankful Poor”


*
The General’s son studied the picture with the patience and skill of an art expert, gliding his hand over Nancy’s crayon streaks of torture and sentiment.

“It’s Bruno,” he finally said, putting the picture down. And he rubbed his eyes the way he’d seen the General do or the way adults do when they remove their spectacles.
“Who? The bear?”
“Yeah. He was a bear in the forest. They called him Bruno and he returned to the area for the first time in over a hundred years…and they shot him.”
“What!?”
“Yup. I saw it on the news on Wednesday. After we had dinner in the rec room.”
The General started to pace. “They killed – ”
“They shot him, General. As he was bathing.”
“Perverts.”
“What’s a pervert?”
“Someone who shoots bears.”
“Have you ever shot a bear?”
“Do I look that sick to you?”
“I’m sick. Maybe I’ll kill a bear, too.”
“Never. I wouldn’t allow it.”
“Why do they kill horses?”
“Cause they can’t shoot artists.”
“What?”
“They starve ’em instead.”

— excerpt from my 2006 novella, Where Ladybugs Go to Die

Where Ladybugs Go to Die

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Aug 17 2013
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literature, Poetry

Spleen

highlighted-spleen

The more honest you are in your art, the more dishonest you feel you haveto become in your life.

There’s something broken down, something imminent when you’ve spilled your guts.  And you can’t go back and say sorry or I didn’t mean that.  Truth, like baby chicks, need to be protected. But we don’t live in no incubator. As soon as you leave the art or whatever you may have created – even if its just a thought or a perfunctory mark on the cave wall (to prove you existed) – you have a choice to make when you back out into “their” world.  You can swim upstream and go against the current – but you must be prepared to pay the price. It’s hard revealing the boils and sores on your soul, it’s like an acne-marred face that could be beautiful if it could see beyond itself and into another person’s eyes…I shared a photograph that I took of a lovely woman with a “mental affliction” who had the greatest glimmer I had ever seen, in fact she made me almost ashamed to complain about the death-riot in my head and my dry mouth…I showed it to my counselor and they all neatly decided there was something wrong with me.  Why?  Cause in the photo a splendid stream of saliva stretched across the yarn of this young woman’s face like a St. Bernard in all its glory.  And they said that was sick, that I was a sick sick man.

And I lied and said “Oh, my.  I did not notice that.  That’s obviously a mistake, of course that’s not beautiful, of course I don’t think – “

But it was too late.

Now I’m done, un-done, with none, kaput. Finished.

And so because I no longer have to worry about offending the people whose obscene views of life berate and insult me I can at least – again – be honest and free to not be embarrassed by my desire to feel or be feeled or be feel-ing…all that spins and flows through my veins.

And now, especially, when they say: “Oh, may I share a poem with you?”
I will watch to see where it comes from.

And if they pull it out of their pocket instead of their spleen I’ll know that I am still in hell.

(originally published in the 2010 chapbook Lying Meat)

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