The Small Psychoses
It’s not, you tell your friends, necessarily apocalyptic, or even interesting.
Not the FBI-planted microchips inside the head. Not hand-waving street-cornering. It’s just these things lapping in, uneasy, the robin at 6 am.
A world that moves before you like a wall of feathers.
*
First the morning trills tell you lay by lay by lay by.
Then it’s dig me dig me and ties you to the bed. Who is this?
Sparrow whose each fall is augured? No. Larger.
(These are not metaphors.)
The robins crack out.
*
Tiring, the untangling self-scrutiny. Did somebody speak just now? So loud? Did the sentence ever end? Did the start of it match the way it ended?
Smile. It seems to have been you.
*
The world leaps out of your eyes, and speaks back. Until it doesn’t, as if a hand came muting a laptop’s mutterings. You’re relieved. You miss it. It’s safe now. Silent. The unitary I returns, hacked from its passage through the world. Maybe you don’t want it again.
*
The don’t-tell-anyone-ness.
The to-hell-with-it-I-will-ness.
The oh-no-I said-something-ness.
The you-hide-it-so-well-ness.
The someone saying I-have-aches-I-worry-I’m-just-like-you-ness.
*
I tell my friends, sometimes what exhausts me are the prescriptions. Six of them in the round tan little bins. Fighting with insurance to get enough to travel (the where-would-you-be-going-anyway-ness). The TSA agents who pull the bottles out and demand to know the reason. People jostling close to you mutter just tell them.
The pharmacist who once shouted lithium! and everyone near you heard him and you left.
*
The there-really-are-no-friends-I-could-tell-this-to-ness.
*
How do I know I won’t end up street-cornering? I know usually. It doesn’t go that way usually. Maybe if one day I’m sick of hanging on. The way these drugs gnaw the body. To eat chia seeds with the blood numbers of meat-gorge. Glucose blooming from the liver.
Coursings of your body-made fat and sugar. The doctor who won’t help with this, because she finds the other you scarier than this one. The what-did-you-expect-with-this-diagnosis-ness.
*
The robins crack out.
–You. You have exceeded your dress (trill).
(How do they know you?)
I’ve pushed at you the vine maple
with its forwarding claws.
I never knew you had an itch like that.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
I bite my own breast, and I paint my feathers.
*
Hard to forgive those who believe you can never be trusted. Though sometimes you agree with them.
*
But that night before the robins. Coyotes and a struck sheen of moon. Others heard or you would have thought it was just your mind again. The hard shifts between barking and howling, the regret: first yips bursting grieved against the moment, the next howling it all to stay and live again.
You saw a new fawn rising, whose legs seemed incapable
of the weight of her.