Mental Illness

August 18, 2017

“When You Tell Me That You Feel Alone” by Sam KillmeyerPosted by

Sam Killmeyer

WHEN YOU TELL ME THAT YOU FEEL ALONE

how am I supposed to feel anything
but the worn basin ringed with trees sighing

through grey November days stretched out
like the cat, wet on my front porch,

waking in the morning cold and knowing only
the urge to be smothered under bed covers.

When you tell me that you feel alone
I think of standing on the grey prairie

with the sky too big for me, thoughts
blown out by common milkweed’s face,

body scraped hollow with a wrought-iron ladle
and flooded with all that was, will be, might become.

When you tell me that you feel alone
I remember being a struck lightning rod

floating above the earth, charged but nothing
through which to ground out the flames.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

__________

Sam Killmeyer: “I moved to Kansas from Cleveland the summer after graduating college. I was 21 and had never been west of Indiana. That fall the Flint Hills were gold-brown, crisp from drought, and standing under the giant prairie sky I felt my ‘I’ shatter. In some ways, that breakdown made room for the glimpsing of other lives that makes my poetry possible.”

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August 16, 2017

“This Has Nothing to Do with Willpower” by Ted JonathanPosted by

Ted Jonathan

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WILLPOWER

to kill germs
after handling any doorknob
you need to scrub soapy hands
under scalding water until
the world is a doorknob and

to kill germs
you need to scrub soapy hands
under scalding water after
touching anything touched
by unwashed hands

clothes hanging in your closet
need to be perfectly aligned

legs of the kitchen table
need to rest on pin-pointed spots

visitors are an invasion
you must keep watch
recall what they contact
as soon as they leave
those things need to be
methodically sanitized
and/or put back in place

your heartbeat’s not right

constant loud static
of exact random sentences
or number sequences pound
ceaselessly in your head same
sentence same number sequence
no letup no room for anything else

you are the symptom

day-to-day living
a depleting charade

respites very rare even
then you’re nothing but scared
scared of your own mind
knowing torment’s always near
running dodging ducking
what’s not visible in the air

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

[download audio]

__________

Ted Jonathan: “Other than that they cause isolation, the OCD and PTSD symptoms described have nothing to do with poetry. I am, however, very pleased to give readers a taste of my experience bearing the burden of these two overlapping mental disorders.”

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August 14, 2017

“The Sanitarium Window” by Leland JamesPosted by

Leland James

THE SANITARIUM WINDOW

A small stand of trees, unremarkable.
I don’t know their names.
They’re like a knot of folks waiting
for a train, or for a store to open
—a gathering, that’s all. They don’t
seem to know each other. They didn’t
plan to be together there in a field of weeds.

Yet, on second look, they are remarkable,
having stood the invisible winds of winter,
stood the bitter season that comes
to each alone, that separateness of sickness
—mind and soul—there in the bent of trees.
The trees seem to know all about winter.
Seem to have winter in their bones.

Perhaps someone else would see them
differently, a different reflection,
a family gathering, not just a knot.
Some might see them that way.
Some might see them differently.
And I too, perhaps, on a different day.

The others around me, others
by the window, silently looking out
—I can see us reflected in the window
when the light is just right. Another
stand of trees, a knot, not planning
to be together here in a field of weeds.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

__________

Leland James: “I have lived with depression for decades. One gets used to it. And much of the time, given the carnage and grief all around, it makes a certain kind of sense of things. Not that I would recommend it.” (website)

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August 11, 2017

“What I’m All About” by Steve HennPosted by

Steve Henn

WHAT I’M ALL ABOUT

No wonder somebody from Plenty of Fish
talked to me. She wasn’t real. I got catfished.
Down here at rock bottom it doesn’t seem as funny to me
as you might think it would. Without my beer goggles on
the profile pic looks surprisingly similar to Taylor Swift.

I’m such an emotional masochist I’m just going to let
that one hang in the air like a thick skunk fart and permeate
like self-loathing that doesn’t go away even after a 25 minute
shower  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . it looked like a picture of Taylor Swift.

No one with her name in the Syracuse, Indiana, area, where she said
she’s from, could be found in a Facebook search. That didn’t seem suspicious
to me. When I told her I wrote a poem I like
instead of asking what it’s about she said “lol nice poem.”

Then she said she worked at Paradise Liqiours (sic)
and of course she has her charity organization.
Still no recognition of a red flag on my part. She asked for photos
of me, my children, and my house. Now she’s scamming someone else
as if she’s a single father from Nowhere, USA, with a seven-year-old son
exactly as adorable as mine. I never did send a photo of my house.
Or my PayPal login. Nope. All I did was give away my dignity.

I think I must’ve ignored everything that didn’t make sense
because I felt lucky a real person was talking to me.

She wanted to know the story of my life.

She wanted to know what had put me here, single in Indiana
in the wealthiest nation on Planet Earth
without a wife, such a “hansom” guy like me.

It seemed like she was really interested in me.

It seemed like she really wanted to know what I’m all about.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

[download audio]

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Steve Henn: “I don’t often write directly about my mental health issues in my own poems. Two different times I’ve enjoyed extended stays in some of the most unhelpful psychiatric wards Indiana has to offer, but not since 1999. I see a good psychiatrist usually four times a year, and stay on my medication always. Doc S. says I’m bipolar with generalized anxiety disorder, and it’s the most accurate diagnosis I’ve ever received. I work full time and raise four kids alone—it’s important to me not to use my diagnosis to justify learned helplessness or to make excuses for myself. We get by.” (website)

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August 9, 2017

“Fallers” by Alex HarperPosted by

Alex Harper

FALLERS

I wasn’t used to alcohol except a pint
so when the lads organised a day-trip
to the races and we drank Pimm’s
like it was barley water, on the coach
and more on the course, I was deserted
by my ability to stand.

So I lay on the ground in the public enclosure.
 
Patrons muttered I was a disgrace
and part of me was ashamed but
the simpler part liked the softness of the grass,
the galloping I could feel but couldn’t see,
and the stillness of it, safety, nowhere left
to fall, nothing to take in but the sky
which was my prize that afternoon,
and worse things than debasement happen
at sea, and there were shit times ahead
so I was grateful for that holiday
from the tyranny of walking or loading my hopes
on a creature resigned to carrying
the one who whips, and unaware
that the Land Rover which shadows the race
contains the vet, who if a crucial bone is broken
mends it with kind noise then darkness,
better the abstract purity of blue, unowned,
untrained, unridden, unwatched by anyone else
that day, and for the space of those hours 
I was winning, happy and undone, until
the light began to fail and it was time to go home,
back to the life with a web of fractures
and black ideas about how it was going to end.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

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Alex Harper: “Diagnosed over ten years ago, and medication-taking since then, though a few times I’ve fallen off the wagon for the usual delusional reasons (I’m cured!) which, to my regret, never ends well for myself or others round me. I wish I was a daily, diligent, careful, profile-building writer, but there are months I can’t write at all, and then weeks when all language shimmers with possibility and I write a lot. I tell myself, when that phase comes, that this time it will last forever. It never does. So, a patchwork poetry career. A patchwork life.” (website)

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August 7, 2017

“RE: Heaven’s Spam Filter” by Dan HaneyPosted by

Dan Haney

RE: HEAVEN’S SPAM FILTER

Dear Dan,

I’ll be your new God for the foreseeable future. Remember when you were a child, and your mother would tell you that God passed over people like you? Not far from the truth, actually.

The original G has stepped out for a few weeks, so you can think of me as your Interim Savior. I focus primarily on international tax evasion schemes, the refugee crisis, and deal with the spam filter. Which is where I found you.

I got your poems. Thanks for your (unsolicited) letters. Frankly, reading through most of them, I couldn’t help but think you should be seeing a therapist.

Do you think before you hit send? I mean, honest question. For example, I found this one particularly cringe-inducing: It was originally titled “Letter to the Angel of Death,” but I altered it slightly:

Dan Sends Off Another Ill-Advised Email to the Lord

Lord, if you still believed in mercy
you would have killed me off
before now. I imagine my viewing:
the church sits almost empty.
Even Jesus left, peeled off the back mural.
My ex-wives are there. They reach
the casket, all agree: This must be
the first time he’s slept alone in years.
The pastor who speaks of my integrity
has never met me. Mourners tuck
cell phones inside pew Bibles,
text each other about which pub
might have enough parking
for the entire funeral procession.

Jesus Christ, man.

When I assembled you, this isn’t quite what I had in mind. I didn’t give you rough hands & all that dead weight so that you could sit at home and write poems.

Go outside.

Swing an axe. Lightly choke your wife—see if she’s into that.

Some people aren’t meant to write elegies—I need people like you to dig graves.

Love,

God

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

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Dan Haney: “I’ve carried a bipolar spectrum disorder with me for nearly a decade. Throughout my illness’s various silhouettes and manifestations, poetry remains my most authentic and meaningful point of entry. It provides me with a vocabulary of grandeur while simultaneously allowing dignity in self-loathing. I like to think poetry takes me to a better place.”

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August 4, 2017

“My Beautiful Father the Fire Bird” by John GossleePosted by

John Gosslee

MY BEAUTIFUL FATHER THE FIRE BIRD

Today is the day of finishing little tasks. 

The words of his body locked in a stroke
the doctors can’t edit.

*   *   *

He walks through the brown field
in Vietnam, the ambush,
agent orange pedals in the sweat.

The nurse spoons in pureed beets,
wipes his mouth, elevates the dead hand
that was filled with fire.

*   *   *

He held my wings in one hand,
the scissors in the other
and after the clip I beat my wings
so much harder to fly. 

He steers my face’s pale fire
from the psychiatrist to the hospital,
the stomach pump, the in-patient.

He says, 
whoever you become now,
I will love him.

*   *   *

And father, people have begun
to love my words, chewed so hard 
in your mouth, fed into mine.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

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John Gosslee: “As a teenager, after moving around America and Europe every few years since I was born, my family settled. I felt cornered by what I still feel is the way of the world, and I was depressed and disconnected. My parents took me to a psychiatrist. I began running away to find something that felt real. I began writing poetry. When I was fourteen, I calmly took all of the pills and medicine in the house. I was in intensive care and then in-patient treatment for a few weeks. My parents took me to more psychiatrists. I was diagnosed manic depressive and was hospitalized again at sixteen. I still wrote. It was painful to be in a place where I was not understood as the kind of creative being I knew I was. I didn’t have any connections or in-roads to a world that I saw and couldn’t access. After being off of antidepressants for almost a decade, I started having anxiety and hospitalized myself twice in my twenties. I wanted to live, I was contributing, but I didn’t have all of the tools to cope. A decade later, I’m so happy that I had those experiences and haven’t had to take any psychiatric medication for almost twenty years. I’ve learned to take the sadness and anger and channel them into something meaningful for myself and others. I have learned how to lead with my vision. Sometimes I still feel out of touch, distant, a thousand years old, but I work through it. My poems give me strength; their precision, the wisdom that I stumble into, makes even the hardest days or weeks of moods bearable, because I know I’ll have something valuable when the smoke lifts. Through all of the realization and loss, poetry remains the one consistent thing in my life, and I know to the depth of my core that I’m fortunate to have it. In poetry I have hope, I have a voice, and I have a community. This is my home.” (website)

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