#MightyPoets

When my arms ache from

Holding myself together

And they fall away

My hands dripping wet

Because words pricked me until

Pain bled through my skin.

Cruelty ground me

Scraped so thin the light shines through

More hollow than man

What could we be if

We were not crumbling away

Hurting each other

What could we be if

We were holding together

When our hearts ached and

We weren't the reason

Other's hands were dripping wet

From holding themselves

And bleeding alone.

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

My family went to the mall, but we all went separately. We met up on the first floor and roamed noncommittally. Then I said that I wanted to go upstairs to the bookstore. After being unable to find what I wanted there, I told my brother that I wanted him to hang around until I was certain my vehicle would start. The mall was based on a combination of the two level mall near the base I was stationed at and the Minneapolis airport.

Then my family and I were on a boat, trying to get home from our hometown mall, a trip of thirty minutes in real life, by taking a boat through a river down the middle of Los Angeles, which is nowhere near where I live and has no river surrounded by lush jungle. The streets resembled the Erector Set construction of carnival rides, and gangbangers made fun of us as they raced along them in stunted pickup trucks and shot us with small caliber automatic weapons. After I was hit badly, my mother took one bullet out of my arm and said it was good enough, though I’d been hit at least a dozen times. While we were stalled, a girl jumped off the boat into the water, which at this point in the river looked like a commercial swimming pool with tall, green, algae covered walls. She came back aboard and sat next to me, saying she was sorry I hadn’t been able to find the book I wanted. We stopped again, and the girl was in front of me shoving a photograph into my face. I took it and moved it back so I could see it. I did not recognize the woman in the photo, but knew the girl was in league with the gang boss who had stopped our boat. I told the boss directly that I didn’t know her. We continued. Later, a man and a woman came aboard. They were like QVC hosts distributing coupon books that small towns give out to new arrivals. They kept threatening to shoot people as they explained that this whole trip had been a scam. Someone else killed the woman with a rotary cannon on the boat’s roof, and I strangled the man after he tried to shoot me.

Then I was in a Mexican restaurant making fun of the man and the woman. Actress Summer Glau was there. In the dream, she was someone I was close to, not necessarily a romantic partner, (and not actress Summer Glau, either,) but she was not a real person. (Glau played a terminator on the Sarah Connor Chronicles and she was something similarly non-human in the dream.) I woke as the ancient mariner did on the morrow morn, a sadder and wiser man.

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

I was in an arena that resembled a high school gym, but in a wooded area outside; everything was made of trees and tree branches. The place was a village that housed a religious cult, and I mansplained to a young woman with a long, ash blonde braid down her back how cults abused their members. It wasn’t until later that I understood that she knew that very well. Then I walked down a river bed to a biker rally where I got mixed up in an organized crime ring led by Anthony Michael Hall. Hall played a bully on the sitcom Community, and he appeared as that character in the dream. My refusal to participate in Hall’s scheme resulted in my father and brother appearing tied to a motorcycle. My father had been beaten and my brother appeared as he did just before he died from cancer two years ago. When I woke up the first time, I was choking the living shit out of Anthony Michael Hall.

Upon falling back to sleep, I found myself in my old high school. I sometimes have recurring dreams that the administrative offices are tucked into a small corner of the northwestern part of the building. (The actual admin office is much larger and across from the southeastern entrance.) The offices in the dream resemble the dungeon row doors of the psychology service at the local VA hospital. The principal’s office was labeled, but I could not find her. I went back out into the lobby and saw her. I did not speak to her. I needed help, but knew that she would not help me. She looked like the woman who represented my district in Congress years ago. In real life, I wrote to her about some issue and she never replied. Also, in real life, she can’t be more than four years older than me, so her appearing in a dream as my principal is kind of a neat trick. The meaning isn’t hard to discern. I was harmed by educators more than I was helped by them. I continue to be harmed by politicians more than I have been helped by them. No one is there to help me. Everyone is there to punish.

Then I was walking outside to the bus. A girl I liked was there but she vanished. I couldn’t find a place to sit and my mother was driving the bus erratically. The rear emergency exit opened onto an elongated platform that I stood on while trying to keep from being thrown off the bus. The bus careened through all the neighborhoods it had in real life, and then we were driving through the high school, its hallways somehow big enough to accommodate a school bus tearing through them like a bloated Indy 500 racecar. I woke up still trying to avoid being killed.

My late brother was estranged from our mother, as am I. I was obliged to get back in touch with her, as I represented my brother’s estate and she was one of the heirs. There was a point when she said that if she had known that she would do something that would alienate us, and I didn’t finish reading the email. She would have what? Been the parent she should have been to begin with? What stopped her? Our interactions during this period consisted of her being conciliatory while denying things that happened, punctuated with explosive anger when she was upset by things I said. I don’t have the energy to deal with any of it. My Emotional Support Canadian confirms that my mother was abusive and regards my mother as her enemy. I think it is awesome that twenty percent of the Canadian population is aligned with me against my mother.

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

If I were President, people would notice that there were cats around the White House. Then there would be more cats than people. Than all government officials would be replaced by cats and I would be revealed to be a burlap sack puppet operated by three cats.

#Disability #MightyPoets

No horizon line

Separated my earth and sky.

Smudges in the same dull gray

A faint hint of the drifting days

What becomes of the dullest gray

As the pale white bleeds away?

But the darkest clouds whited my eyes

Staring through pain did not make me wise

Would you know what my world consumed?

When you look at me, you see a tomb

Of screams so silent the air stands still

Lest the words break the world, endless and shrill.

I trod for miles through the dust

My life mist or flakes of rust

Too light to leave footprints in my wake

Fading insignificant into the emptiness.

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

My rage is not cruel.

My rage is not wild.

My rage is a shield,

that I bear for a child.

The metal is scarred,

the straps are worn out.

It wrenches my arm,

but I stifle the shout.

But what of the child?

Do they follow my wake?

Can't bear to look back,

there's just too much at stake.

#Abuse #Depression #Anxiety #PTSD #MightyPoets

Yesterday I noticed a spray can of Comet Foam cleanser sitting on the bathroom sink. The can said it had a pleasant lemon scent. Noting the state of the sink, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Only after I had hosed the sink down thoroughly and inhaled a lungful of lemons did I note the instructions. It said, essentially, that if you can smell the fumes, they are killing you. I don’t know if giving lethal fumes a pleasant scent is considerate or not, but for some reason it seems incredibly American.

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

My brothers and I were driving through endless canyons surrounded by trees. They disappeared after we arrived at an Iron Maiden concert. Arnold Schwarzenegger opened the show by flooding the arena and lecturing on special effects as curtains of light shined through the water. Then I joined the band onstage as their bass player, Then I wandered into the venue's kitchen, where the Pillsbury doughboy told his dough children that they could cut their fingers off and make ladyfingers. Just because they could, didn't mean they should. I woke with the fading vision of a cleaver poised over tiny dough fingers.

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

I was walking across a grassy field bounded by concrete and streets, reminiscing that I was owed money by a high school crush who had betrayed me. In the dream, we had been in a relationship, but in reality, she rejected me as every girl/woman rejected me until I met the con artist. The high school girl was standing in for the con artist as I reflected on actual betrayal.

I moved from the field and a dog was following me. I was afraid, because dogs attack me. I passed onto a bridge and some children started throwing rocks at me. I shouted at them to stop it, as if they didn’t know what they were doing, but they knew. Monstrous children know they are cruel. I caught one of the rocks. It was flat, triangular and sharp, meant for gouging out eyeballs. Then I woke up.

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

There once was a man who was uninspired

"Will this prompt help him?" faire Nina inquired

Nay, he would grouse, grumble and pout

For Calvin May was a layabout

And there is no helping a light bulb that is underwired.

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