alice tells me to grow older
she has one of those aged mirrors
with the nickel stains
sitting at her stone table
she combs her hair
how do you do?
but alice, I say, you’re not far from here
we’re not far from here
but I don’t recognize my face
through the nickel blotch
and she says come closer
you stupid girl
there is no way out
there is never a way out
this mirror, she says, is our window
Hey all, I’d like you all to check out the first part of a series of interviews I’m doing with artist/self-taught sculptor/and survivor of severe Rheumatoid Arthritis over at Chicks Dig Scars here: Interview on The Untitled.
Here Mike begins talking about what the sculptures are about, why, and the agony and wonders of being so severely disabled at times. Please follow him, he’s new to the blogosphere and he deserves to be heard (and he’s hilarious). Chicks Dig Scars
Me and Mike on the right
My best friend and artist/sculptor Mike made this of me–a portrait of my madness. He says it’s not
quite finished yet, a few more fixes and then firing it and glazing… He was inspired to make it after I explained to him what it was really like to be psychotic, and he made it for me. When I saw it I cried pretty good. No one knows me in the way that he does. I’ve written about him before in poems and essays (check out my essay on him: Matters of Time and my poem: Mike)–the artist with severe rheumatoid arthritis (has had many major joints replaced: knees, hips, shoulders…) and he’ll be putting
rough draft, written at 3am, hmmm
EB-125
I think I’m seeing white birds
white birds scattering away
from my window, out there
in the cold January, their wings
sound, from here, like sheets—
my grandmother’s white sheets—
on the line in June.
The light coming in is white.
Color? Or space?
Like the space we can never fill.
Like the start of a narrative.
Like the blank walls,
like the hospital rooms
in their yellow smoggy halo. Continue reading
At some point everything becomes clear. That doesn’t necessarily mean a good clear, but fact is preferred over fiction when you’re locked up in a mental ward. Again. And it’s snowing out–and worse–it’s New Year’s Eve and you’re thirtieth birthday is coming and you’re little girl must be looking for you. It’s all you can do to decipher the shell-shocked woman-child looking back at you in the tin mirror bolted to the wall above your sink. Here you get your own sink because this time, this trip into the bin, they knew it was much more serious than they had originally thought, and your “security” was upgraded. You have a thought you would usually have–that the upgrade only makes you feel more nuts–but at this point, you don’t feel nuts. You are nuts. I say to myself ‘I’m clinically insane’ and for a moment I believe it’s something to smile about. When the leading psychiatrist told me on New Year’s Day morning that I was clinically psychotic and suffering from complex PTSD, I thought about my mind–clearly–for a second, and I imagined a blue and orange brain-scan image showing clouds of sick. Then I slipped back into the room , in and out of dissociating, and the yellow walls were much too close and I could taste rubber in my mouth and then the hyper-arousal–the flashback coming. My clarity is gone. I need drugs. I need chemicals to help me this is too much–and I dart across the sitting room to the glassed in cage the nurses sit in eating Christmas cookies; Nurse Jo knows me well by now, she knows I’m too embarrassed to say anything; I inch towards the far left window near the hall to my room, she casually looks up and I give her the look and point to my room. Like I don’t want people here to think I need help. God I’m an idiot sometimes.
Nurse Jo always followed with a heated blanket, Seroquel, and fact sheets. As I laid there sucking in air and crying like I imagine I 
must’ve when I was a little girl, feeling blindfolds on me and blood on my cheeks, hot and sticky and too real, Nurse Jo would shut off the lights and tell me to squeeze the blanket as she calmly, almost like a drifting story, read aloud the facts of trauma and sexual abuse and post-traumatic-stress disorder. I liked facts. They neatly fit into my head, massaging my brain.
