#MightyPoets

I've been misunderstood

My readers have been confused

I lack clarity and maybe

That is why I deserve abuse

'Cause I know that I have been misunderstood

My voice never left me

But coherence was never mine

I've been writing, I've been told

Else my thoughts would burst from my skin

Stillborn and cold

'Cause I know I've been misunderstood

When I see my words lying limp

Over their pale blue corpses

They could not make them live

I've been misunderstood

I've been confused

I've been looking for connection

But I can never be myself

'Cause I will always be misunderstood

Will always be abused.

With apologies to Deep Purple and their song "Mistreated."

#Disability #Depression #Trauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #Suicide #MightyPoets

A therapist told

Me that I was stupid to

Look to the past for

Answers. If I had

Thought that she would listen to

Me, I would have said:

I always looked back

And turned into a pillar

Of salt. Eyes frozen

On the past, because

The future is not living

And in the present

We die in every

Moment that passes away.

We see only the

Corpse of our regret

In stillness, never changing

While the future is

Seconds becoming

More maggots on the corpse as

Our heartbeats tick down.

And horror dawns as

We understand that because

We can only look

Backward, we do not

Live, but relive memories

Frozen forever.

The future is not

Death. We were ghosts already,

Haunting our own lives.

#Disability #Depression #MentalHealth #Trauma #PTSD #Suicide #MightyPoets

I despise the word

Warrior. It doesn't describe

How I struggle with

The sadness that crashed

Into me as my mind screamed

That I had to die.

I am still standing

When the tsunami washes

Away the scabs of

The last beating

It gave me while keeping my

Balance from the time

Before. I do not

Fight. Should I stab the wind with

A sword, shoot the rain

With a gun? I end

Each beating, neither victor

Nor victim. I am

The stone, weathering

The water's constant onslaught.

Light shines through me as

I wear myself away.

#Disability #Depression #Trauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #Suicide #MightyPoets

Sadness burned me out

A compassion starved kiln from

Which I rose cocooned

Sloughed off the bits of

Me that I could not live with

Covering charcoal

I am smudged across

The pages of my life, letters

Of blurred ashen snow

I am painted on a

Mountainside, fading in the sun

Misjudged, forgotten

From the foothills runs

The highway to the horizon

Go before I'm gone.

The grey rabbits race

Drifting in the wind across

The long lonesome road,

Serpentine footprints

They left for me to follow

I lope behind them

Hoping to find the

Line where the earth meets the sky

Where things long parted

Find each other again.

Will what was hollowed

Fill what is hollow in me?

Will I regain me?

No.

I, the charred grey snow

Longing for emptiness, for

My path is sorrow.

This poem was inspired by a question @whitechoclat

asked me. If you like it, it is because Jessy asks great questions. If you don't, it is because I am not good at answering them.

#Disability #Depression #Trauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #MightyPoets #Suicide

As the obstacles

Between us dropped away, you walked

To the horizon.

You never looked back

Your silence skinned me alive,

Laying bare all that

I thought I had done

Wrong. Your vague letters salted

My wounds as I loped

Toward the sun, my

Vigil unending because

I loved you.

We were together

Still when you wed someone else

As a joke. I could

Not laugh after weeks

Of hearing nothing from you

Not even that it

Was over. How did I

Become the bad guy, when you

Ghosted me?

I now stand vigil

Over the place where I hurt

Feeling nothing but

Anger.

#Disability #Depression #Trauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #Suicide #MightyPoets

When he heard the Black Crowe’s version of Otis Redding’s Hard to Handle, four lines inspired him: “Actions speak louder than words/And I’m a man of great experience/I know you’ve got another man/But I can love you better than him.”

He was so pleased when he wrested her affections from the other man that he did not recognize the gratitude in the loser’s face as he walked away, picking at the hem of his turtleneck sweater as if he wanted to take it apart thread by thread, but was reluctant to reveal what it hid. The triumphant man would hide those secrets himself soon enough.

Inside of a month, the man was covering his bruises with long shirt sleeves. This got him into trouble with HR, who insisted that long sleeves needed a tie. He barked his refusal, then apologized and excused himself for the rest of the day, pleading illness. Noting his paleness, sweaty brow, and slight shortness of breath, HR gave his departure their blessing. The next day, the man had solved HR’s problem by showing up in a turtleneck sweater.

As time passed, his co-workers noticed that he would “space out” when certain things happened. Heated arguments sometimes occurred in the office. The man had once been the voice of reason when they got out of hand, but now he seemed to go away when the shouting started. When exasperated colleagues, women in particular, spoke sharply toward him, he seemed to retreat further inside himself before finally coming back. His efforts to restore order were a faint outline of what they had been, before the woman.

The man broke completely and for the last time when the regional manager came to the office for her quarterly presentation. She had a habit of whacking whichever part of her Powerpoint slide needed emphasis with a ruler. As she stared at the screen while talking, she didn’t notice her employees’ growing alarm as every whack caused the man to jump, as if he was trying to shed his skin and fly away. When his seat squealed as he thumped into it after his penultimate jump, the manager looked at him. “Do not interrupt me,” she said, as she smacked the ruler down on the table in front of him.

He screamed as he leaped to his feet, ripping his sweater half off before standing rigid, as immobile as a stone monolith. Two half scabbed wounds in his neck dribbled blood. He did not speak, having gone somewhere inside where nothing could ever touch him again. The woman had arrived, smelling of lavender and rust. She took the ruler from the manager’s hand and slapped it against her palm. She would take care of him, she said, and her smile was so beguiling that they believed it. The longness of her canine teeth did not bother them at all.

His bloodless corpse turned up in a drainage ditch, not three feet from where the body of the loser he replaced was found a few months earlier. When the man broke down for the last time, she already had a new man who had made the same promise: I am a man of great experience, and I can love you better than him.

Postscript: I feel like I should relate this to self care in some way. So, don't date vampires?

#Disability #Depression #Suicide #MentalHealth #PTSD #Trauma #MightyPoets

We became us in a long moment between

the heartbeats of creation

when the sun shrouded its face in clouds

because it hurts to see the world

and it could not bear to look at the earth

anymore.

The light diffused through the sun's shattered sanity

dusted the world in strange shadows

that smeared the edges of our reality;

We existed on wet paper with

watercolors bleeding through.

We could only exist on such a twilit earth

in which reality was as malleable as dream

and took shape beneath our hands.

A world that we made for us

From the dust of stars and more ancient myths.

Our song was written across the bones

of the sleeping earth

and sung in the twilight cascading

through falling autumn leaves.

We were as inexorable as the setting of the sun

and our end as inevitable as its rising;

As creation's heart beat once more

the sun looked upon us through eyes unclouded.

As its madness passed, it burned away the

shadows that sheltered us

exposing our world as a Tower of Babel

and with its passing, we could not

understand each other

anymore.

#Disability #Depression #Suicide #Trauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #MightyPoets

I

I cannot breathe

and grope blindly for the words

lost in the chaos wrought by my devastation.

They fly in black clouds, locusts swarming

the most vibrant words always just beyond my reach;

they slip free of my fingertips with chittering laughter.

The words I snare are much paler

and grow paler still as I thread them into

sentences, as popcorn is threaded into strings.

And they twist, contorted,

with too many limbs,

as they hang freely in the dead air.

As I watch their sickening writhing, I reflect:

As twine lends its form to a popcorn string

so does a sentence derive its shape from its meaning.

But the squirming of these misshapen words

has made a grotesque mockery

of all that I wanted to say.

II

I would wring the ambiguity from language

and pour it into a lamp and set it ablaze

that this impurity be scorched to cinders

and as its flickering and fading embers

erase the colors from our pain

we see the confusion wrought by words

growing ever and ever colder

until words themselves simply die away.

In the light of a fire unfettered by the

failure of language, our truth would stand plainly.

And if we would look through eyes unglazed

by the bullshit benighting us

perhaps we would see each other

and find peace in understanding.

#Disability #Depression #Trauma #MentalHealth #PTSD #Suicide #MightyPoets

You are a splinter

that I cannot pull out

because I am a balloon;

hollow and defined only by the

breath that fills me.

Before you came I gasped

in the rarefied air.

Meaning and hope, so meager

I drew all I could

through lips tinged blue.

When you breathed into me my

hollow skin became the vessel

for something indescribable;

and as my soul was buoyed

up in the hope suffusing

your sunlight scented air

I found peace in finally

understanding why I am here.

Your silence pierced me;

the point of a spear mounted

on a haft carved from your memory.

If I forget you, everything you gave

me will bleed away

and that would be unbearable;

for everything that is good in me

lies in what you gave me.

But disquiet disturbs those memories

and their writhing grinds the point

of your silence into my deflating skin.

I wish that I were strong enough

to endure your quiet

or wise enough to understand

what you aren't saying.

When you spoke to me

I saw the world through your eyes.

It was not so terrible.

Left to this void not graced

by your voice

you fade.

In my last gasp

you taste like Katarina's rage

when she handed me a razor

and told me she wished me dead.

#Depression #Disability #PTSD #Trauma #MentalHealth #Suicide #MightyPoets