The sponge

I am soft and full of holes,
Preserved by smiles
That host soirees in my belly,
Every once in a while.

Forest fires snuffed out
By the swampy stretch of shallow summers;
By the mountainous intimacy,
And the cold blood pumper.

I am the overzealous draught
Puffing up the wrong trail,
Where Circe’s shrubs grow dull
And Rosemary’s spell tickles your snout.

Their nymph dance clouds the air
And you stare, as the same shade of ash
Stains the ocean and sky.

I smile at your glassy eyed eagle eye –
You are at sea with my oddly set genes.

My two-minute love, I am
The train of thought you couldn’t follow,
The prospect turned to vapour,
Floating up to be a cloud
And raining down to wet your dreams.

Don’t expect me to bloom
Just because it is spring.

You amaze at the flowery insights
Budding off my frivolous tongue,
At the bleeding emotion
Ejaculating from my ripe fat fruits.

There is a pureness and ease
To this elephant happiness.

But the sickness, you see,
Has been breeding for months
And the worms inside are waiting
To rush down your throat and smother you.

As you press your feverish mouth to mine,
It is your weakness that will rot you.

I lie before you, truthful and bare.
Trust me darling, all I really am
Is a few padded memories of childhood,
Waiting like dew to dry up in the sun.

I have soaked up more than any barnacle could bear
So just give me a squeeze, and I’m done.

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Photograph of view from Punta di Circe, San Felice al Circeo, Italy

Nap Time

Finally, it is nap time and I wake up with my nose smashed into metal. At least the bodies aren’t here this time. Oh, it is happening again. Something weird is growing in here somewhere and I can feel it trying to scratch its way out. I’m not quite sure what will happen when it does, or if there’s anything I can or should be doing to stop it. I’m on autopilot again. This black tar-like feeling is spreading in me and I am constantly on edge, fear chewing away at me. I am so fucked. Everything is perfect right now and I’m paralysed by fear: I am slowly being forced to walk blindfolded off the plank and who knows what lurks beneath. Will she be there to steer the wheel this time? She know the rocky planes off the paths better than I do. Or will I be left powerless and lonely to keep myself awake while this dull sleep washes over me? My lips and fingers are so dry, shrivelled to perfection by sleepless nights. I feel slightly sick all the time and the pain behind my eyes pushes the lids shut. But I cannot sleep now, oh no. I cannot sleep ever, not with this fucking HD screen stuck on channel suffering 24/7. I have grown morbid again: guts and violence seem to temporarily lift me out off the torpor. Disgust is the most awake I’ve felt recently. Irreverence is my comfort blanket.

Choke.

I can smell the lethargy in the air as the rain comes down.
Who told you you could write all over my skin?

Territorial disputes.

Casually manhandling death and the rain
don’t stop, the rain           don’t stop.
Biting breasts under neon colours.
Stuffing your face and drowning in the barrel-
Drowning in the rain of your pain.

Contempt for conformity. Body builders of human agony.
The vivid dreams stopped months ago.
Flashes of blood running down my neck.

This winding road is damned and this skin is too tight.
Grinning mouths with men hanging at the corners.
Unsteady flooring and gums aching.

I’m heady from the drinks, the want and the sweat.
This tube smells of metal, blood and piss.
There’s a nightmare pulsing in between my legs.
Laughing hyenas pull at my clothes.           I give in.

Vaccinate me for control.

Chapped lips in the cold. Stomach acid scratches at my soul.
Flashing streetlights, cars, dancing on my window.
Magnetic network of obligations and purpose.

Buzzing in the world and screeching in my ears.
Monotone high pitched frequencies and I’m going mad, I’m going       mad.

The itch, the itch the pulse           in the eye,

the everlasting night, the bite,

the blood.

I’m a mess of filaments,

my nerves are barbwire.

Your fingers feel like bombs.

Psychosis, migraines, want.           A hollowed out gut.

Out of body,

overlooking this city.

You stand next to me, naked and shivering.
My cigarette shakes at the lips.

It falls and I          let          myself                               fall.

Post #14 – Incomprehensions, Reason and Grandiose Beliefs (featuring Edgar Lee Masters)

Today, dear friend, I realised I had become a faulty puzzle piece: incapable of communicating with you. The sound of my voice left the bubble of my mind with powerful distortion. And my magnified words, filtered by anger and resentment, would weigh heavily in your ears, incomprehensible. And of course you would confuse the strain on my face for disgust.

I think my words might have changed, grown darker. Maybe what makes perfect sense in my mind is gibberish to your ears. Was I really that simple, only five years ago? I wonder what happened during this time: I have not only lost my mind, but maybe my grasp on reality as well. Or rather my ability to settle and adapt to your reality. I envision myself as clever and thoughtful, and for this reason maybe I feel superior, to the likes of people who avoid preoccupation. But maybe I am delusional. The doctors say I’m delusional: they say my ideas are grandiose and impossible and, unlike everyone else, you seem to agree with them. If I’m delusional why am I like honey to all these clever bees? But who are they to deem me a role model, who are you to profess me unreasonable, who are any of you to judge? Every unexplored and unconventional field of science, knowledge or consciousness has been deemed grandiose at some point in time.

I am not convinced that there is a page for me in the annals of history. I’m not even sure I shall contribute to the world order in anyway. I am simply following my gut, which for once in my life seems to be in accordance with my ideas, with science and with progress. So what if my ideas are grandiose and unrealistic? If any of you could give me a semi-accurate description of what reality means to us all, I might take your arguments seriously. But you are all clinging with a vice like grip to what you know and you’ve been told. You call me irrational but even logic and reason are irrational! You are accusing me of deviating from a perception of the world that has been proved incomplete. Who is to say that mine isn’t more accurate?

Maybe this “psychosis”, “dissociative state” or whatever, has been the most realistic aspect of my life. I have no conscious grip on this part of me. And my conscious reflections are made up by all I have learned and stored. But what we’ve learned and stored may be wrong. Maybe my thoughts are too influenced, and I cannot see clearly. I am only ever certain of anything when I hear things and see things that others do not. I am certain then, that that is my reality. If only I can see it, it means no earthly phenomenon has put it there to change me and teach me. It is pure, immoral and inhuman. Maybe it is a very visceral and honest part of me and my essence.

I cannot know this at this point in history and certainly cannot claim such a folly through scientific logic. What I can do is listen to my gut a bit more, and do things that make me happy, whether they be clinically validated to do so or not. I may go through many ups and downs, critiques and miscomprehension’s, but never will I ever give up on a life of courage, love and beauty. I will not let fear control me or let apathy grasp me in it’s comfortingly numb tentacles. To understand and to accept the beautiful and dangerous beast that is life, but not to fight and push it away. To contemplate all with lightheartedness and childish curiosity, but not to empty my head of all that could potentially harm me.

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On this note, here is a pretty awesome poem by Edgar Lee Masters:

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me —
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbour.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire —
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

(George Gray, Masters E.L, 1916)

Post #1 – Berlin and Violins

The tube felt like an old abandoned hospital, that chilled and grey afternoon in Berlin, and me and my friend were vibrating with the promise of youth and the residue of unknown places, friendly faces and chemical elation. The little old woman in the bright pink raincoat stopped us dead in our tracks. She was crouched in a corner, her face barely visible beneath the few strands of scruffy grey hair and my breath caught at the surreal notes coming from a little battered up violin in her rusty hands. It overwhelmed me how something so unconcernedly and obnoxiously ugly could bring tears to my eyes and shakes to my chest.

I looked around in that moment, at the people walking briskly by, busy and absorbed in their duties and endeavors, not a single eye blinking in our direction. It was our secret, the pink little lady’s and mine, and in that minute I felt as if we were floating in some cosmic web of truth, which only we understood: all was perfect. An attractive, well-groomed man in his late twenties bumped into me then, a brief apologetic expression on his face and then back to his fast pace and his fast day.

The bliss abruptly gave way to resentment and I pitied him, I pitied humanity, for being so incapable of distraction. Incapable of stumbling upon the beauty and the detail that filled my days with joy. The way the sunlight warms your face on a breezy spring afternoon, a friendly face on your daily commute, a complimentary glance, a sentence in a book that makes you feel less alien to the world. All these viscerally important things seemed so trivial to all the bodies rushing past. My hands tickled with excitement and I was catapulted back into their world: I was completely lost.

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That day in Berlin I realized that, regardless of my violent moods and temperaments, of my many disappointments and unsuccessful endeavors and of the constant and invasive confusion in my mind, my life held infinite value. In that brief sequence of events I discovered in myself, and in my ability to perceive all that surrounds me, what will always be my utmost reason to live and thrive in this world.

As mentioned in the ‘about’ section of my website, I was recently diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type I, after years of struggling with severe shifts in mood, insomnia, anxiety and psychosis. As a result, I am currently taking a year off my academic career, in a quest to find some balance in the murky warzone that is my mind.

I am starting this blog as a record of this yearly adventure, in order to document the lessons I will hopefully learn through psychotherapy and personal exploration. I have decided to share my thoughts as practice in confessional literature and in the hope that someone may find my words insightful and inspirational in undertaking their own road to self-fulfillment.

This web-site however, is not a handbook on how to cope with a disease: it is an expression of my growth as a human being, and my various attempts to thrive in who I am, and what I have to offer the world. I perceive myself as an occasionally organized chaos of ideas, emotions, moods and beliefs, which may have traits in common with the symptoms of manic-depression, but are also entirely my own and distinct from everyone else, whether they be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition or not.

Some of these sections have been written in moments of profound mania and frenzy, some are creative and some are boring, some are dull and others rather clever. It’s all in here for you to delve into if you please: a partial recording of my ups and downs, my booms and busts, my rational reasoning and my occasional insanity.