poem sixteen

Page Seventeen

Saturday 17 May 2008 Greenfield

On April 24 I met a woman who turned out to belong to a NEW pack of mental health workers (the Recovery Learning Community), and they say they're going to help me find an apartment and find out how many of my animals are still alive, and where they are. But they are not as talented in the field of acting as they perhaps think they are, and there's a variety of facial expressions (badly acted), over-empahsized words, etc., that ring very false with me, very off-kilter. And as it turns out, their funding comes from the DMH, the walrus that destroyed me and destroyed my life. Will anything come of their promises to help?

Last Sunday was the first Mother's Day of my entire life without animals. An exercise in pain, that day, but then again they all are now. Tomorrow's another special Sunday. Exactly 33 years ago, on Sun 18 May 1975, I graduated with my first college degree. I was 22, the future was before me. I did not train for a career while at college, I only studied what I liked, so on that day when they put that degree into my hand, I had no idea what the future would BE, but I did believe that there would be good in it. I did believe I would have a husband and a house and children like everybody else I knew. I also believed that marriage might end in divorce, like so many, but I at least believed it would happen. At 22 I knew that I was odd, that I was in some puzzling way different from other people, but I didn't know yet how vast my difference was, and that IT, together with my raging immune system, together with the cruelty of the neurotypicals around me, would lead to 33 years of failure and poverty and trauma and loss. I didn't know on that day that I should have taken that new degree, run across the esplanade, and drowned myself in the Charles River right then and there. I didn't know that all that lay before me was failure, and poverty, and worst of all, the cruelty of other people. How COULD I know such a thing on such a promising day....


This failure mommy marches on in bumhood and soul agony. Nearly 11 weeks homeless, and to my knowledge, the Department of Mental Health and the Community Support Services in Greenfield, Massachusetts have not done ONE thing to find me a place to live. Around the end of March Shirley Temple made some mutterings about some things she MIGHT do, but as far as I know they were never done. And they think that no one dies of grief....

The other day I saw the sociopathic landlady for the first time since sheriff day on March 11. Still fat. Still bleaching the hair. A professional person in the Turners-Greefield community who has everyone convinced (as she once had me convinced) of her sweetness and sainthood. But there is no law she won't break to get her way, and there is no unethical or immoral thing she won't do to get her way. And there's no amount of money she won't spend to get her way....

We should have a poem. Time isn't as reckless as it used to be...

Number 16

I dream.
Sometimes of you, the stolen,
I dream.
Sometimes I dream of the thieves.
Dream only in the night now,
only in tossing sleep.
Daydreams are all away,
vanished,
pilfered,
like you.

Remember? Do you recall
how many were the daydreams
I could make?
Do you recall
how very good I was
at dreaming?
Absent now,
the pages torn.
Like you.



to the poetry page of my website.

Update 18 Nov 2009: The Recovery Learning Community did not help me, anymore than the DMH had. The RLC had said they were going to locate my animals and stop anymore killings, and they were going to help me find a place to live with whatever animals were left. They did nothing. Once again I was led around by a string and then dropped like a hot potato by a social service agency. To see any of these people on the street triggers me, if you know how that word is used in relation to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. To see Matthew triggers me, and the psychotic, criminal landlady, and the mafia-connected tenant. Trigger, trigger, trigger, every time I walk out my door.