Bipolar in the Mayhem City

I know you didn’t mean

to break my consecrated silence with

your bloody teeth,

but I had spent hours before your arrival

opening my third and fourth eyes

to try to find relief

and yet all I could see were torture visions

from the astral plane,

witnessing mamas holding their dead babes

and the blood of the innocent running ragged

through the streets,

feeling then the tantrum demons rise within my brain

who then held my head under the boiling waves

of the underworld,

and I screaming for deliverance,

or at least one full night of fucking sleep.

And when I finally

snapped out of my mind and back to the earth,

I told you in humiliated whispers

that I had been raped

by the devil

in the back of a red pick-up truck

that sat in your driveway, and

your response was to smirk

through your cigarettes

like my pain was a fucking punch line.

So I nailed my hands to the headboard

and swore to myself

that I would never let anyone

witness my

shape-shifting magic ever again,

thus to dull the phoenix burning within,

I spent hours taking shots of absinthe in the afternoon

and popping pills in bathroom stalls

to dumb myself down to “normal”,

whatever the fuck that means,

then sexing rough boys

who always called the next day and

I never picked up the phone,

instead sat in showers,

sobbing for hours,

rocking back and forth with my guilt

while razor blades and

bottles of asprin

sang me their sweet siren rhapsodies

all the way through the night,

into the morning hours,

rise and repeat.

But that was a few moons ago,

or maybe even years,

I cant quite remember,

and I know now

that I am getting better

at giving myself some grace

through the hard days,

bipolar in the mayhem city

(which I queried might just be

the Freud-fused American

psycho-pathology

of our modern day shamans),

yet either way these movements

flung me topsy-turvy,

deeply haunting me and growling loud still

within my heart and head.

In spite of it all though,

I am remembering to breath deeper now,

seek peace stronger now,

focus on my own healing and awakening

more fiercely so that I may

pass love on and heal the wounds of

whomever wanders my way.