Dysphoria Quartet

In the bipolar swing, there is occasionally a 'mixed state,' where one gets the delightful combination of the worst parts of both extremes of the cycle. A technical term for this is 'dysphoria' (literally: 'bad feeling') (one of the cute little details of psychiatric language) .

Subtitle: Why God Invented Lithium

Body Language

I am clenched tight to ram my way through
fog in front of me
the skin of my arm jumps with the need
to flood out a thousand words
my fingers are frozen silent
my legs long to run
my feet are still
weak
my mind races in place
and I never see the scenery

In the Small Hours

From ancient dreaming I woke up at two
I wandered waking into street-baked night
to hang between the walls of man
and mind

bound by aching
wrung by my own
muscles
hungry for breath

I sifted through the thousand cities
layered on the stone
and never found
my own

uncertain in my very form
not knowing if I loomed among the towers
or tumbled with the wind through hollow streets

the earth inherited beneath my feet
wept away in sandy trickles to the sea
the only certainty remaining
in black unblinking planes
the walls
always
the walls

In Color

I have an anxious tummy screaming yellow.
It tastes as acid as the void
smells like burning iron
looks like static on the screen
feels like static on the skin
moves like slowly writhing snakes through all my veins.

For the Birds

Stuck out of gear between
the back-swamp dead-soul zombie-rot of my last
depression and the treetop jazzdance sing-out-world of my next
mania I am snagged on splintered thoughts
hungry and tossing away everything in the fridge
go away and give me lovin'
frayed nerves gotta fly mired here in my body
like bluebirds
singing
in snow.

 

---

Bipolar Cycle
Next in Bipolar Poem Cycle
Other Poems

Back to the last page you were