emily and I

This is an old post from the original Mentalhell blog, which is now just about defunct, so I've moved this here.


thurs 17 april 2008 greenfield

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem that begins something like: I'm nobody, who are you?/Are you nobody too? I am nobody now, even more so now than I was before the DMH got done with me. And like Emily, I'm a reclusive person who also writes poetry and wants to keep separate as much as possible from everyday human doings. It just isn't for me. Thus the animals, all of my life. But I guess Emily's family had some money and she could get away with being odd. When you're poor and you invite the DMH mind-police into your life, you can't get away with the great crime of being who you are. Of course I didn't KNOW they were the mind police and the self-appointed controllers of where and how I would live, and with whom, when I invited them into my life. No one had ever told me the REAL mission of these mini-dictators. I was told I would get ASSISTANCE.

So they did what they did, they destroyed my life and left me with nothing, homeless, 55 years old, physical illnesses, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and they helped me right out of my life. After all the trauma I'd already had in my life, they delivered me the worst one ever, the king of pain, the queen of grief.

Here's a poem I wrote years ago, but it now runs through my mind just about every day:

I have come where mountains cry,
where tales of failure wander by
and fill the sundown sky with streaks of grief.
I've sung a strangled, unloved song,
but I can still those notes before too long,
since everything was wrong, and strange, in me.

If you see me on the cliffs of stone,
remember that I've bled and screamed alone,
and earned the right alone, to jump and die.


The poem is only partly factual: I was alone in the realm of humans, but I always had the animals, and they did love my song, and they were a large part of what always stopped me from jumping. Now the DMH has robbed me of them. Some have been killed, though I'm not sure how many. The others have been adopted to other people, and I don't know who or where. This is one of the things I used to say to them:

I love you as big as the sky,
as big as the sea,
as bright as all the light that ever was.

It's still true.

Update 28 July 2009: I have come where mountains cry... I will never leave the place inside me where mountains cry, no matter where I go. It's very hard to produce actual tears on celexa, the antidepressant. I noticed that side effect when I took it back in 2003, and that's why I eventually stopped taking it: it felt too wrong not to be able to cry. But though my eyes produce few tears, there is a constant crying inside me, even screaming, and a dark emptiness. Will I jump? It's not too likely. I tried several times last year to end myself, to get out of the hell of having lost everything that mattered, and the hell of being in sneaky, undercover federal protection, and the hell of having people show up in Greenfield who wanted to kill me, and the hell of the ignorance of Greenfield and Turners Falls. I tried to jump. But something in me won't do it. Maybe I have too much of an aversion to killing, even when killing is the only thing that makes any sense.

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read... Scealta liatha(poems in english)... website...
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