Just A Clip

I'm laughed at for my tripling, my quadrupling,

I have to recheck myself because it's called major anxiety.

I've screwed up too much from depressive and hypomanic storms

And blacked out memories that I can't allow,

Can't handle, or give up the need to perfect;

Too much has been ripped from my control these last few years--

And in these last nine months or so,

            My mental has felt so topsy-turvy,

                        Side-screwy.

How would you like hallucinations jumping in,

            Seemingly ordinary

That you're rocked off finding out

            Reality isn't

Is not

Yours anymore?

Accidental gas potions brewing like cauldrons,

            Threatening to kill your lungs,

Or flames licking your kitchen ceiling

            Slick with perfumed oil--

All of these are your mistakes

            And none of these registers until it's almost too late?

You laugh at me for my counting.

            My pacing.

                        My hand-wringing.

                                    My fast-talking.

You see these traces,

            My different faces.

But you've never seen me fully relaxed.

You don't get that I'm not making myself paranoid,

            I live with paranoid.

One error, I fail.

One error, you move on--brush off.

            It can eat me for days.

Even if everyone says things will be okay,

Unless I have a one hundred percent

            I cannot give you the guarantee

That I'm not going to recycle:

            One...

                        Two--

            Three,

Repeat. Maybe?

Disappearing

I feel like I'm drowning on sand.

I'm weighted down, can't breathe it seems.

I don't quite understand how I spring leaks,

When I feel as if I'm mummifying,

            Muscles calcifying.

Brain seems to obtain more holes,

            Caverns and tunnels I hardly know where they go--

Except further down into the dark,

Down through the tree trump I spiral out,

My how the lights all seem to go out,

            All over dear broken Wonderland.

I wake in the night to my cats' paws

            Stabbing my ribs and breasts

                        As if my familiar is stabbing

            Deep holes,

                        Jabbing quick and hard,

            As if wooden stakes are missing

Their marks.

I dark not drink, as if my subconscious

Is trying to hold off the inevitable fact that I'll become cement;

I already crack with each thwack my life brings.

Mind and body.

Body, mind.

Soul?

I fear she may have flown.

            Wake me, this stasis has me gagging, gasping.

Can we just halt the clock a minute,

The second-hand stutter in my palm

            As I search for the answers?

Back through to the other side of the mirror where a hint of me awaits?

I know she's sitting there,

A smirk waiting hidden in the corner

            Of her lips.