ALL RESPONSES |
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Are you over-worked past the limits of your capabilities?
We have good drugs to keep you going, and the
appropriate brainwashing – school, work, TV, religion,
fast food, money, paychecks, plus a few weeks of vacation.
Yes, you’re stressed out and want to kill your self.
Go see a doctor, a therapist. Take these drugs. Don’t think so much.
Sleeping pills keep the nightmares from keeping you up.
Antidepressants, sometimes with side effects, sometimes not,
treat something that’s causing you to fall apart.
Still sad and tired? Double the dose.
Pharmaceutical factories operate at full capacity.
Fill out this survey. We’ll find your disorder.
Don’t beat yourself up. Try these yoga techniques.
What? You think you’re in the wrong line of work?
Maybe it’s time to cut back on hours, work part time,
and do something else. Weigh your options. Make choices.
Decide. But take these pills, please.
Your condition has a biological basis.
And really, really there is no answer. So don’t ask.
You’ll need a new face to work in the growing empire.
The old skin is worn out, cracked, discolored and smells like fallen leaves.
Here’s a popular model; put it on. Don’t worry; you’ll still be in there.
Don’t say, just do. Reprogramming is a process. Put a smile on your face.
You’ll be part of a society of overworked, undereducated,
sleepless zombies, dead beyond willpower and need,
automated through the power of chemicals. We need you healthy.
We need you working. We need you. |
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A notable woman requires lines
like sparrow’s feet
clutching the corners of her eyes
legs exposed to the knee, blue
veins leading nowhere
in particular
Years spent mining
salt from sadness,
love from the stars.
No one need tell her
she is no longer young
nor beautiful
for she no longer panics at the hesitancy
in the creak of the stairs
or his words
no longer fears
of the blue black
of death.
Instead she watches the wind
Sweep leaves
from branches
and in their skeletal remains
she finds the sky isn’t nearly as empty
as the feeling he has left her with.
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When Alyse first had Molly she did not know what hit her. First, while she was pregnant, she was so sick nothing would stay down. She had to receive painful nutrient injections in her ass. And the gas, geez, she would burp and fart without abatement, she gave up excusing herself, she’d simply wave a saltine cracker and shrug. And she never slept through the night; too much peeing and riding up on the balloon in her belly. Pregnancy was misery followed-up with child birth, topped-off with a baby. God Damn hard work and waking every two hours is physically painful. She tried to return to her job, she was a woman on the trading floor and that was a rare sight to see. And she was good at her job; even revered a bit. She called the office from the hospital room while she was in labor to remind them to change the variables in the Mark-to-Market equation. But when she returned, rather than being a model of professionalism, she was the forgetful one, the weak link, the dunce. After a meeting in which she spent the entire hour considering Molly, her boss took her aside. He was welcoming her back, ostensibly, but reaching out to her as well. His wife delivered their first two days before Molly was born.
“So what can we say about it?”
“I can tell you I had no idea I’d love her so much, I had no idea. And I’ve changed David, you know that and so do I”
“Hmm”
They spent the next hour re-crafting her duties, assigning them out to the rest of the team.
Alyse had had a baby, and was herself, reborn. |
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Anything that needs
to be said about
upcoming snow
storms, the instincts
of animals and death,
love affairs, self-slaughtering
or your odds of probability
at any of these—
anything that needs
to be said about people
who gradually succumb—
it’s all been said in dialogue
between you and me and god |
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It's odd how temperature works
in a resurrection machine.
Just when you think you have
a hold on your frame of reference
flesh oozes off of you like pages
turn to find the ending of a good read. |
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she resurrects dinner from stuff
hanging out in her fridge
she resurrects the past by moving to another avenue
by stacking her poems photos albums in a front porch
that is the entrance
to what truly is
she resurrects by figuring out without a manual
how to set the clock on the new microwave
that heats her morning coffee
she resurrects by walking thru dry leaves in her back yard
down to a brand new river |
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| he could not bring me up from the depths of debt. i asked again. the silence of a moving cloud. where is the gold i gave to your shroud? and of course it is about religion. what hasn’t been since day 1? but then again, my feet make prints of gold in the dust of tales i have told, or i hope they do . . . and then my skies are fallen. |
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It was a dark house despite its windows,
attempts to catch interior light in the woods.
The sea, a continual throbbing on shoreline
against the wind which stalked light,
bringing it down like the birch, bony
and barren, shattered over the road,
as broken as a football player’s limbs.
In the heavy November dark, the moon,
a gibbous moon, found a leak in the clouds
and squeaked through strata of dark
and white clouds, ropey webs across
its face. Moon light swam on the sea
and sea foam. Despite its array
of windows, bay, art deco, atrium, wall
and roof, the house remained dark, intense,
burying itself into pools of mock serenity,
seemingly floating through shadows’ strictures,
depths the house could in no way fathom.
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Grey and khaki colors appeared one day
Floating above my sink
A strange creature is living in the gutters
You say it is my lost reflection
Yes, the one that disappeared
Years ago
I don’t like living under mats
I prefer being silent at nights
Listening to animals' echoes
do you know
That a wild black animal is hiding behind my round navel?
Pawing around with a cone hat
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backward soul arrive longer than I practiced saving - my face
first incensed in night, now fading into the warm brown places,
autumns past, celestial light drifting hands begins withering
place a stone here.
for the world, staining as rain- the raize-
sideways glancing past roadsides not meant.wounded gently beneath me,
as I cope.
these are benign times of troubles - crossroad nevermore to find
that cliff ending. blows beyond me, razor sharp places drift, fates are reciting:
down blankets, living fight, hands not writing no longer their own
lay flowers down beneath me should I follow should I go.
God's will face, less is the frailty of cupboard, a wind
thanks to the giving me these courses running below me
below never a more to find Him in me
nevermore
he is in a cliff face, thinking a Peaceful ending blows.
far below Him lay down inside me, fates - reciting the fainted
places in winter will abstain from faces, from leaves, from shading.
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Suppose you are the secret
of the shore—a strong wave
lying on its side—
you'd come to earth again
you could live one more bold
day without meaning to,
anew, on winter's piney floor;
I say, I've been
to the door and wept;
you say, what door?
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| Please click here to read my latest blog entry. I think it relates to what we're doing here. |
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the hours drag across my skin
chiming with bursts of soft red to stain
these curtains
enveloping sunlight
devouring night light
becoming puddles of flesh
how the waves hang from my cheeks
lapping as a lost dog newly found |
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for twelve hours, a hole in my memory
punctuated by pale yellow pills,
purple wine, black sweater,
the thud of my body
hitting green carpet,
a red car, warm hands,
more falling--
a wheelchair, a needle,
something stiff in my throat.
how much easier it would have been
for this body to stop breathing,
sink into soft cotton bedsheets,
be done with the whole fiasco. |
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Last night I went to see my prescribing psychiatrist (we will call him Dr. Zuckerman) for the first time in about eight months. I was not looking forward to this visit, as I was going to have to tell him about how I took myself off antidepressants on my own recognizance, and having some experience with members of the profession, I was expecting this news to go over like a fart in church.
Even so I was scarcely prepared for the reality of what did happen. Dr. Zuckerman is a pretty cool customer, even among modern-day HMO and hospital psychiatrists whose interactions with each potential nutcase are limited to ten to fifteen minutes each. I imagine Dr. Zuckerman, when a lowly resident, probably distinguished himself by keeping his cool no matter what his early patients got up to. I picture the other residents scattering with cries of alarm as an inmate consideringly hefted a pile of his own feces in his hand--Dr. Zuckerman would merely shoot his cuffs, flick an invisible speck of dust from his white lab coat and then with the smooth reflexes of a cat, simply dodge the missile. He ought to have been able to hear that a patient had gone off one of several prescriptions with some equanimity.
I don't say he leapt out of his chair or even so much as passed a shaking hand through his hair, but in four years of consulting him I have never seen him so worked up. He turned a bright cherry-red and asked me, somewhat stiffly, why I had taken myself off my depression drug. I told him after ten years of increased doses I had concluded the stuff wasn't working. I also told him I had been reading the work of Robert Whitaker and other medical writers, doctors and even psychiatrists who had become alarmed by the effects of SSRIs on patients over the last 30 years. I told him I believed that Prozac had made me worse--more desperate, more suicidal.
He gestured impatiently and told me there was a lot of money to be made in writing books like that. I refrained from pointing out that infinitely more money had been made and is being made marketing "magic bullets" to overwhelmed doctors and their uninformed patients. I really didn't want to argue about it.
"What are you planning to do for your depression?" he asked.
I told him: a support group, a talk therapist, resiliency training, supplements, yoga, St. John's Wort.
"But St. John's Wort acts in the same way as an SSRI," he argued.
"No side effects," I put in.
"I've known people to get the very same side effects," he responded. "Nausea, dizziness, sexual dysfunction."
I decided not to say anything about my recent discovery that my "sexual dysfunction" had turned out to be due to my marriage.
"At the risk of sounding like a jackass," he said, "I should point out that you are not a psychiatrist."
I thought the risk was much greater that he was in fact calling me a jackass, but I nodded and said that I knew I was not a psychiatrist.I hoped that this evidence of my grasp on reality would reassure him, but he only went on to warn me darkly that without the Prozac I would fall into an even worse, "different" kind of depression and that the only way to avoid it was to get back on the drugs. He failed to mention that this new, different kind of depression only happens to people who had been taking the drugs (like the original "Postal" postal worker), but I already knew that from my seditious reading.
"It's already happened," I agreed. "I stayed in bed for a week once."
"Then what happened?"
I shrugged. "I got up and went back to work."
He tried another tack.
"So you're willing to take a narcotic sleep aid, but not an SSRI," he said incredulously.
"The narcotic sleep aid works," I said. "The Prozac didn't."
I thought that made pretty good sense, but clearly I was now a hypocrite as well as disobedient. But there was worse to come. He told me over my long history of chronic severe depression I had demonstrated bad coping mechanisms, that I indulged in negative thinking, that I whipped up dramatic catastrophic scenarios.
I nodded feelingly. "Yes, that's me. But Prozac never helped with that."
Faced with the prospect of a Lucy with self-dramatising tendencies on a Sunset Boulevard scale, he went calm with despair.
"I'm afraid," he said quietly,"that you are the kind of person who having decided to never take SSRIs again will never take them--no matter what."
"I am exactly that kind of person," I assured him.
I can't say things ended on a good note. I left with what I wanted, which was a renewal of my prescription for my sleep meds and for a new anxiety med to keep me from crying at work without also putting me to sleep. But I also left with a warning that if my depression gets worse and I refuse Prozac or (as he once threatened, Lithium), he will refuse to prescribe for me altogether. That feels punitive to me, and not particularly logical: if I don't take the depression drugs that don't work, he will not let me have the sleep meds or anxiety drugs that do work. It also left me with the same feeling as I have gotten when dealing with various social services; that very little is to be gained by telling the truth.
I think Dr. Zuckerman is a good man, good at what he does according to the way he was trained, and while I believe his treatment of my depression has been a disaster he has always done a good job with my anxiety and my insomnia. Now I feel that, like some low, new acquaintance of Mr. Darcy's, I have lost his good opinion of me and lost it forever. Of course his good opinion of me was based on my willingness to be drug-compliant rather than any of my actual sterling qualities, but the sense of loss is still there. And it's a dare-I-say depressing taste of what's to come as I negotiate my own treatment of a malaise I have struggled with for thirty-one years. |
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True
resurrection is only a reminder.
Your keys were always
there in your jacket pocket,
my friend; these old jackets
are always lying. |
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The sun is so quick
in November the shadows
cannot keep up, find themselves
falling further and further behind
as the squirrels criss-cross them
and the blue of the sky becomes the green
of the grass. I tell you what my son
has said, how just a few blades
of grass keep us from all the darkness below.
Do not tell you that when we are lying
on those few soft blades, all that darkness
beneath us, all I can think about is how
the sun feels like your hands upon
my skin and the wind in the canopy
mirrors my desire.
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Quilting and stitching I feel me southbound going
as snow: way and away from the bones being broken
what scales have you last offered my blades
ties binding-
I am the grass going.
My tooth and nail to a table to the tree lynched
What are the offerings, here on wounded knee?
The crow and the crucified, here with me.
When did you last pass bye my swinging rope?
The hours, the hours, hand over hand circling
what scales have you last offered in lynching?
And the long train way and away from the bones it’s been eating
gnash and hay- down home you go, gnash and hay- down home you go.
I the grass.
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You could not dredge me from the depths of debt.
Then, the silence of a moving cloud;
Where is the religion of your mortal shroud?
What has not been since day one?
Again, my feet make prints of dust,
And then, my skies are fallen.
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There at the bar
he suffers dusk
to silver anguish;
he is a machine
of resurrection,
a demolished man,
a phoenix waiting
for flames
There at the bar,
a man among women,
he is a beginning
a mote,
a speck
he is anything
his whiskey says
he is and more
makes any woman
pretty for the night |
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Resurrections are better left to saviors
that leave empty tombs for women to
find. Where angels roll heavy rocks with
slight effort we labor, seduced by the
thought it’s meant for us too. Seductress,
Resurrection. Pioneers always moving,
addicted to longing – itching to run when
things go wrong and this scheme or that
loses luster – poor mathematicians erasing
our work until we discover what’s wrong,
not in us but surely the plan. I was little
inside, unprepared for this living, wanted
only to feel the cool wind at my back: Different
world, newer lovers, better friends, Madonna
mother. Then I stumbled across the answer one
day, etched in strange letters on a red lacquered
plaque or rolled inside a fortune cookie, soaking
into the moo goo gai pan. Whichever it was, I found
out at last, why though I rowed many boats, I never
got far: wherever you go, there you are.
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Resurrection...
You speak of it as if it were that latest fad
we all should follow.
But resurrection from what
and even more to what?
I think we should focus
on the life we have now before it is too late.
Resurrect your heart, your mind,
make it fresh, new again,
give it colors, softness,
all that we have lost
while growing up into adulthood.
That's the sort of thing I wish for,
a new beginning within me while I am here.
To resurrect the lost or dormant hopes,
able to breathe life in huge gulps,
become inebriated by it,
that is what I want to resurrect
not the me that is flesh and blood.
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The violence of a moaning cloud;
a vision of the mortal shroud—
an update or new form of Bosch.
Hands make prints in dust,
gnawed on by the hubris
that only skeletons can bring:
bones go on
though the soul can not sing.
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Resurrected from the cave:
the oppression of sorting and packing,
the boxes teetering and renting the truck,
and the computer’s screen screaming that it
can’t go on because I have
infected it with my greed for more/
changing lanes too fast to
put on the brakes when the
security system flashed red—RED--stop
instead sped right on through the trap.
A virus twisted around the guts of the brave
Dell machine I was only able to pay off
finally with the help of a friend
after the interest skyrocketed out to space
and I knew I would never
Never be free again. And now
that dead dumb piece of junk
was trotted off by a lucky inheritor
of lost causes. Time kept me entangled
in finding all the passwords
(thank god I wrote them down)
and the websites and the picts
and the slog of boxes
out to the new home and
new certainities.
Yes, resurrected.
I am happy to say.
A poem.
More than just copy and paste
and delete and send and pray for the
rescue from obscurity
by a magical hat from which I pull
ideas instead of rabbits,
beat the drum to the
tune of my voice, my extravagant
desire to sing.
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As one fool falls apart another is born.
Heads rise out of the machines of new morning.
Skulls are playthings for little boys.
Tongues are playthings for the gods.
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tendrilous smoke
birthed by saltwater tongues
their sharp knees
split by rock
wear new skins
given by men
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My entire family;
if you can find them,
even my ancestors
All I’ve ever had sex with;
friends and enemies,
an intimate gathering
Wine and beer will multiply;
I will dance
A few of the youngest
will breathe fire
My father will be there,
a miracle really, considering
As I step into the spotlight:
lights, delirium
and I will perform a repertoire
of my funniest mistakes
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When I was about sixteen
I visited the world of death.
Carbon Monoxide took its time
to coax me into a world of darkness
but while doing so it teased me,
slowed my body down,
and then pinned me on the floor
where unable to move and terrorized,
I was left to understand
not the why I was laying there,
but that I could do nothing to avoid my fate.
My body froze, my voice, gone,
I looked at the ceiling above me,
then it all faded away.
I saw my body lay on the bathroom floor
while my ethereal me sat on the windowsill.
I looked at the body without emotions
as if it belonged to someone else,
then stood in a darkness without cold or heat,
in a place without walls, floor, or ceiling.
There were many others like me,
transparent yet solid, squeezed together
I could feel them against my body
even though I could not see them.
We all stared upward toward a point
we could not see, in silence waiting.
Waiting to be called.
I returned to the windowsill
and to where that "thing" was laying.
I could feel the vibration
coming from the locked door;
my father's effort to take it down.
For the first time I felt something
where my heart was supposed to be,
a mixture of anger, sadness and resentment
for the one laying on the ground.
This after all, may not be my moment to go.
I found myself walking within a tunnel I could not see,
but could feel its rounded walls, ceiling.
A light appeared at the end of it.
A soft white fog-like light and I walked toward it.
I had no feelings, no remembrance,
no interest in what I had been up to this moment.
I had no family, nor past, just my steady walk
toward the end of the tunnel
where now a long robed figure appeared.
Startled at first, not able to see who that was,
I slowed my steps and tried to focus,
but the light was too bright
and engulfed the figure standing
at the edge of the darkness.
One thing I knew; whoever it was,
it held a hand out toward me
as inviting me to come closer,
but something happened and I stopped.
A cry, voices, echoed
in the depth of the darkness behind me.
I had a feeling, a realization; I knew those voices.
They traveled fast through the tunnel,
reverberant against the vaulted ceiling,
reaching something within me.
I raised my eyes toward the end of the tunnel
and the figure still standing there
now framed by a graying fog.
All around me the walls where distorting,
and I felt fear.
Where was I? Whom was the one calling me
now firmly to keep on walking? I don't know.
What I knew then and now,
is that I had to follow the voices
I realized belonged to my mother, my family,
calling my name, crying loudly.
Sobs, and huge gulps of air filled my mind and body.
I wanted to stay, to live, because I knew
that the tunnel was still there and I in it.
One moment of unconsciousness
was the breaking point between life and death.
Resurrection,
I've been there.
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(Some things you should know first: My mother’s first husband died in a car accident. The doctor was my mother’s first husband’s brother, my step uncle, I guess? They called him in the middle of the night. No, I don’t know why they didn’t go to the hospital. Maybe the uncle was closer. My mom was a drunk and my dad was the jealous type so it couldn’t have been easy to call him. Mom said there was a blizzard, but I don’t know how that plays into the story. Dad said it was about ten minutes but I’m sure it seemed longer than it really was. I don’t know if ten minutes is even survivable. Adrenaline, right in the heart. The uncle guy was so freaked the first shot went right through me and into the mattress. The second one worked though. Obviously. No, I never met the uncle. After that I mean. No, I don’t remember. I have a little scar though, right in the middle of my chest.)
When I was two weeks old,
I died of pneumonia.
Like any son of god,
I was resurrected.
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I feel so heavy every day wearing
all these selves I’ve collected. I’d
like to rebirth somewhere in a cave
or a cool spot in the desert.
I’d like to be like a tribal boy in a
wilderness location, living on berries
and roots in a shelter, far from the beating
back in the village of the old ancestral
drum. The only sound I would hear would
be coming from deep within, some singular
tune or ancient drumming, calling my name
on the wind. I’d like to listen to that wind
blowing hard through the blue green pines.
I’d like to walk over rocks like the natives
and canoe on the elegant water, familiar with
shoreline as well as the currents, at home in
every formation. I’d like to pull the world
to my ear like a shell into which I could listen
to the ebb and flow of creation inside, to be
lost in some ancient wisdom. I’d like to
perch in the pines when there’s snow like a
tiny swallow would, to be protected in its fold
like it’s my natural home. I’d like to blot history’s
stamp till it fades like a barely remembered
connection- look in the mirror with a distant
thought of who exactly I’d been. Like a savior
I’d like to rise with white wings to fulfill some
resurrection slip into the forest unnoticed
and cover myself with its darkness. Instead of
this arduous task I’ve been given instead of this
awkward adjustment to living I’d like to be alone
when I strip down to nothing for god
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