Tag Archives: psychosis

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More about bipolar disorder


I wrote the following poem when I was struggling to differentiate between what was real to me and what others told me was real–the inherent confusion of the psychotic, thinking, believing, even knowing I knew better, knew more, could intuit things the experts couldn’t.

Long Ago

I went to the lilac bush
     because it was
                 is/is
     a safe place
     being nothing
     other than a branch
                a scent
     no light to make seeing happen
 
They told me I was sick
     but I knew
     that it was better
                we only know
                the real
                by the not real
 
Having lost
     all sense
     of up and down
                direction
the dignity of admitting
     I was wandering
                eyes closed
                following a faint glow
                of incense burning on a shelf
 
Smell, like touch, always precedes seeing
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What I wrote when I was sick——


I promised to begin looking at the years when I was most sick with bipolar disorder, the most symptomatic.  During part of that time, I attended a day treatment program for the chronically mentally ill and wrote the following poem about theat experience:

Day Treatment  (Poem #1)

It’s Monday and again
we sit in chairs, sprawled
against straight backs,
mid-morning group at day
treatment, talking about
black holes:
                fear of abandonment
                fear of non-being
the endless longing to return
plato’s parable about the cave
                the dark place
                the shadow
                the holy
                the horrible
                the hot coal
carried close to
each of us
so we are, all of us,
                always
                burning