#MightyPoets

When you're talkin' to everyone

And they look through you

As if you aren't there

The shame burns, feeling like a fool

You should have known

That this place is a loaded gun

Blasting your issues into your brain

You know that you are better off shunned

Ancient wounds have me old before my time

But I'm too young to harden my heart

Young at heart as I turn to stone

Must keep my mind from flying apart

I don't know what you want from me

Or why you attack my thoughts and dreams

I stand before you all, my throat bared

This place compels me to share everything

Because my mind is bleeding

I wish I could keep it inside

Wish that no one was ever annoyed

By the words that wash an endless infection

From the hopes of a long gone little boy

Still talkin' to everyone

And I'm an echo or a ghost

I know what you want from me

Order to my thoughts and dreams

To stand before you all, my throat scarred

From abuse enforcing conformity

But sunshine doesn't bleed from me

I think of all the reasons

That I do not belong

Why do I stand here, neck deep in my own wounds?

What curse lies upon this place?

Maybe it had the scent of a safe glade

Where I could shed my skin.

Beneath my hide the monster hid

The scent was threatening, carnage in the air

The trap sprung as I spewed words unsafe, @everyone beware

The mods surrounded me with sharpened words

"This place is safe for us, not you, you who bears this curse."

I failed to fit

Too many times to ever return

Every try sees another bridge burn

I fled in the tatters of my skin

Bearing the weight of a grievous sin

I made others feel uncomfortable

While their attacks on me the mods ignored

The double standard a punishment I deserve

The wounded cannot be welcomed anywhere

When the lights are strange in haunted eyes

And the blood stains pages upon pages until we know why

I wander, on and on

Searching for a place beyond

The grind

The pitiless grind

Of people

I knew that I would not belong

Was it foolish to even try?

All I've ever known is rejection

As my hopes have slowly died.

Based on "Estranged," by Guns 'n' Roses. It describes my experiences at a Discord server.

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

I was lucky that

My ambitions never soared

I fell five stories

With each rejection

And shattered my patchwork bones

Jagged edged, impaled

My body, bleeding

A bone-sludge I drag screaming

The ladder, so far

The voices giggle

"You will make it, keep trying

One more time, what harm?"

I can't grip the rung

My hand slips in the red mud

Iron tinged vomit

The blood dries enough

A post it note grip, I'm up

Delirium borne

Staring down below

The fall didn't break me, you know.

My bones broke against

Hope.

I have no expectation that anyone is going to understand what I experience when my work is rejected. Maybe this poem will shed some light on this as I work my issues out in a broader sense.

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

I submitted a poem a while back that was rejected recently. What does it say about me that I persisted in the face of constant rejection, enduring the heartache and violent mood swings it induces, expecting a different outcome every time? One of my abstract algebra books has words of encouragement printed in the margins. My favorite is, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it.” Another relevant idea concerns my doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. That is the definition of insanity. Am I a fool or insane? Cast your votes in the comments.

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

Messages vanish

Into the void, recycled

By AI into

Affirmations like

"Stay alive! People need you!"

Who are these vampires?

The faceless phantoms

Who somehow benefit from

My screaming through tears?

Or maybe our words,

Vanished into other realms,

Return as socks here.

Socks form from whimsy

Have you seen sock factories?

Why do socks vanish

If they are not stitched

From flights of fancy or pain?

Blistered thoughts or dreams?

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