Tag Archives: alcoholism

Unknown's avatar

On Tremors

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Did you know you can drink for long enough
That without poison your body will seize and your heart will betray you?

Did you know you can love the wrong person for so long that your fingers will clench around your own heart while your nervous system betray’s you?

Have you tasted the seduction of despair?
Do you know how addictive feeling your body die can be?

Have you ever fallen in love with your own destruction?

Sweet man,
Do you still not know the difference between killing yourself and fighting back?

One day I will learn to believe I am a real person.
One day I will hold myself without contempt.
One day I will learn to want to be here.

One day I will be an old man and I will run my fingers through the soil in my garden.
One day I will be an old man and I will see myself in a child and I will give him words for the suffering he does not yet know how to speak into understanding.

One day I will be old.
I swear to God; one day I will be old. 

I will force this body to live.

I will push myself through another 6 decades.


I swear to God;
One day I will be old.

Unknown's avatar

Psychosomatic

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I dreamt about you today.

Washed ashore in a sea of blackout drunk and fever,

Drenched in sweat and saltwater

……..

I told my therapist ‘displacement’ was a sexist trope,

A hysterical comorbidity, of upper-class trophy wives, resurrected from an Era that didn’t know what epilepsy was.

……..

He asked me why my shoulders ache.

And I remembered I had carried you here

I remembered how I watch for you on trains.

I remembered turning to find you standing in the center of my nightmares.

……..

The muscles in my neck twist out my spine

As it hangs from your clothesline

A bucket of bubbles and palpitations

Churning in outlandish red light

……..

Sweep me back out to queasy seas

And find me picking your words out from between my teeth like old food

Unknown's avatar

Crashing Out

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Missed my appointment for sobriety;

The bus dropped me off at jail.

These official courthouse letters,

Always find me in the mail.

……………………………………

A woman in hijab got on,

Six stops down the line;

I saw my best friend in a tweaker

Who assured me you were doing fine.

……………………………………

I sacrificed my handwriting to tremors;

Vodka makes me gag.

Of every ex who haunts my nightmares;

You’re the own who moves most like my dad

…………………………………..

I saw a dead man OD on the sidewalk,

It has trapped me in a daze;

There are children I will never see again; who I helped raise.

……………………………………

My roommate is resentful.

My mother is concerned.

There’s not a friendship or a bridge inside this town I have not burned.

Unknown's avatar

How (not) to survive a Hydra

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I am 14;

I wake up in a cold sweat; sober.

For 7 seconds, I see my ex-boyfriend’s silhouette in the corner of my bedroom;

The memory of a monster with two faces still ringing in my ears.

…………………………………

Iam 16;

I stand in between my mother and a screaming soldier, who I have learned to call grandfather.

I am 16 when I make him and his favorite son leave.

(It will be 12 years before I remember this.)

……..

I am 16 and I hate this place.

I am 16 and I do not remember my own  dreams.

I am 16 and monsters are coming back  from the middle east.

……..

I am 17.

I wake up on sleeping pills and SSRI’s.

The monster has three faces now.

I am 17 and we are still in the middle east.

…………………………………

I am 19.

I wake up hungover on bottom shelf vodka, the empty plastic bottle eyeing me from the corner.

I am 19 and we have always been in the middle east.

I shrug off the exauhstion of fighting a four headed monster and try to push my body through an upperclassmen history course.

I am 19 and monsters are teaching my coursework about their victims.

………………………………..

I am 24. I bury my college textbooks in the back yard.

Dreams have always been nightmares;

So I bury them.

I change out the trauma stained sheets.

The monster gains another face.

Maybe rage will save me where reading has failed.

……………………………….

I am 28 and I can not remember a night I was not terrified to fall asleep.

I am 28 and the doctor has pity in her eyes.

The Hydra behind her has so many faces it has been years since I could remember who they all were.

…………………………………..

I am 28 and I have never been young.

I am 28 and I am 12.

……..

I am 12 and I  have always been at war with grown men.

I am 12 and I am old.

I am 12 and somehow the monster already has too many faces to count.

……..

I am 12 and I am going to survive you.

I put a towel over the puddle the sweat of night terrors has soaked through my sheets.

I am 28 and I am still surviving you.

I am 28 and monsters are coming back from the middle east.

Unknown's avatar

My mothers son

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Sitting on the balcony of a mega complex;

Looking down at the houses still holding out.

I think my father missed prison.

I miss you with every shattered, lonely atom in my body.

How could you?

How could you break me into a shape you have no use for?

In the eye of an empire,

With traumas as vast and varied

As it’s violences;

I will my body to accept change as the only constant

I will myself not to become a martyr

to the despair and hedonia

that materializes out of the shadows and concrete of this place.

I will myself not to internalize the way the allostatic load splinters my elbows.

I will myself to believe people

When they tell me who they are

My father missed prison more than he loved my mother.

I will this new body not to be his son.

Unknown's avatar

They Took My Pencils Away: A Prayer

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TW…psychiatric hospitalization, suicidal ideation, self harm, the Temple
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My doctor asked me to write down warning signs
I wrote “praying”
And he asked me why

I know I haven’t been to the temple in a while
But I’d know these white walls anywhere
A nurse helps me change into a hospital gown
I think I fell asleep standing up

“Welcome sister, can I see your recommend?”
I sign the consent to treatment form.
“In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost”
The ER doctor takes his hands off my head and sits next to me
“We’re very lucky you didn’t take enough to hurt yourself, but this is clearly a cry for help.”

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