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A Life in Poems

~ Exploring my life, my memories, and my dreams through poetry

A Life in Poems

Category Archives: Mental Illness

Blink

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by willow1945 in Ancient ways, Mental Illness, Poetry, Reflections, Relationships

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

poetry, Relationships, sex, universe, void

The ancient yogis said the universe
blinks on and off, and many of today’s
quantum physicists believe the same.

A neon sign blinked
outside the hotel window, rundown,
downtown LA, Rolling Stones
our background music,
while my boyfriend and I,
abysses of inexperience,
managed to have sex;
blinking neon, on and off,
much as the universe,
from being into void and back,
each blink a chance to
change and change again, so

how did Mick already know
that we would get no satisfaction:
paying for the hotel room
meant I would pay and pay,
talk of other women
manifested as affairs,
I would stay,
darkness would descend
and cloud his mind,
and all felt like the pull of gravity,
of fate, inevitable, forcing
us down the only path we saw

while outside the window
blinked the universe,
birthing other universes
with each blink?

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The Pot of Red Geraniums

01 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by willow1945 in Mental Illness, Poetry, Relationships

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

affair, bipolar, London, Love, poetry, Relationships

London, 1969

I almost came alone; my husband, convinced
the plane would crash into the ocean,
wanted to get off until I said I would go
without him. I didn’t know
he hoped in London to escape from guilt,
though I’d guessed of the affair.

Once we arrived, I found a room. My husband,
sunk into himself, refused to leave the bed.
At night he fought nightmares galloping
through his sleep: his mother’s face, distorted,
melting; the two of us in his father’s car, bursting
into flames, and others that he wouldn’t tell.
I couldn’t think, didn’t know, could only put
one foot in front of the other, so I bought bread
and cheese and eggs and soup at the little market
down the street, heating them on our hotplate,
and for Christmas a plum pudding in a can.
He only told me later of the abortion.

The day after Christmas we headed for home,
out of money, lugging our suitcases
down the narrow street.
He wouldn’t talk, his eyes darting
here and there. Heavy clouds oppressed
London that fall and winter, but only now
I feel his terror
as his life descended
into mania and depression;
back then my only thought,
to get him on the plane.
A pot of red geraniums, shining like a lighthouse,
sat upon a windowsill we passed.

Oh, look, I said, and pointed at the flowers.
They can’t be real, can they? In winter, in London?
He looked at them. See the double-decker bus?
The next one is ours. We’ll be there before it comes.

He nodded. On and on, my one-sided
conversation about everything I saw, each time
pulling him out of himself for a second:

red-haired little girl, boy on a blue bicycle,
bus driver with the too-small hat, dog
with three legs, blind woman playing the violin
outside the Tube station, stewardess with hair
the color of Goldfinger’s girlfriend, fat man
in the window seat in front of us with the apocalyptic
snore, crying baby who couldn’t be comforted.
For my husband there was no way back,
but on and on and on I went, and the endless wave
of my chatter carried us across the ocean.

Dinosaur Man

09 Friday May 2014

Posted by willow1945 in Books, Love, Mental Illness

≈ 3 Comments

After rereading one of my favorite books,
The Dinosaur Man by Susan Baur

He saw dinosaurs eating pumpkins
in the fields next to the institution,
the older man from the back ward,
for patients who can’t dress
or feed themselves, his descriptions
so vivid that the young psychiatrist
almost saw them herself.
His mind also made days
lasting thousands of years,
hid memories, drained all the goodness
out of himself and the world;
he died in agony over and over,
listening to his bones break.

He said he was a dinosaur himself,
the psychiatrist his dinosaur daughter;
they gardened in one of the fields;
he sang an old French lullaby
to the marigolds he transplanted.

Distraught when she had to leave,
he wondered if a dinosaur’s daughter
understood his disordered mind
might forget her
as though it had never happened.

He told her she’d been away for a billion years
when she came back months later to visit,
said he’d forgotten everything,
everything they’d talked about,
everything but the love.

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