A glimpse inside a an OCD, suicidal mind. |
MENTAL ILLNESS, By john erik ege At a funeral, the expectation is I should be focused on my loss, But I obsessed over the brunette, Specifically, her tits, and the way Her dress conformed to the contours Of her body, pushed tight against her By a breeze, my mind envious Of the wind embracing her, filling her And my mind with lust. I want to trace the patterns Of her stockings with my fingers, want To bury my head under her dress. The preacher’s voice is annoying. Do we really need to be preached at? At a funeral? I want sex! I must be all kinds of broken. I should be dead or jailed, I think as I stand over my grandfather. The casket couldn’t contain him. I saw this on television: A stroke turned a violent, prison Inmate into a peaceful, brilliant artist. Are we all just a seizure away from genius? I want that! Not the one that transforms me Into a vegetable, or puts me in this box. I want a beautiful mind. At least then, I’d have company. Would autism free me? Allow me to perform math miracles, Play the piano, see other dimensions, Raise the dead? Then tamper with my brain, God! “He looks good,” Mom said. “Are you fucking mad?” Everyone stares. If I had Tourette’s, I would be given a pass, But that’s not my cross, either. “Even at his sickest, he never looked so good As when he was alive!” The brunette sits, crosses her legs. I pray for normalcy. I stare at the sun Wanting to be blind. *** Social isolation is being locked In the bathroom at a party. You can hear the others, but you can’t engage Because it’s wrong to hold conversations When you’re sitting on the pot. Even when you emerge, The shit sticks with you and People seem to know it was you in there Jerking off to the Sears catalog. Would you shake my hand? I feel invisible because people Seem to avoid eye contact. My mind is a medicine cabinet Full of marbles behind a mirror And I lie, waiting for someone, Anyone, to discover me. *** After 8 years, the cat trusts implicitly. It doesn’t know I hold random thoughts of violence. “I should cut her paws off!” Rationally, I recognize the compulsion. On good days, I ignore it. On bad, I mentally scream “CANCLE THAT” in an effort To break the repetition of horror. The cat is unperturbed by the perfectly parallel lines Carved on my thigh, nor does it count the coins I toss daily into the fountain of self loathing. The preacher, my own family, says I’m evil. I believe them, but the cat doesn’t care. When I drunk myself into a stupor, It walked on my back and cried Till someone found me, and even tried Burying my vomit, as if the carpet were kitty litter. The cat sat by the door after the paramedics Carried me off on a stretcher. Had a human been so devoted, I would have said she was broken, too. |