Dozen

My cousin will marry into a good family; I met them last night. The best part about them is their unquestionable love for each other; it truly showed during the rehearsal dinner. They also showed great temperance: usually I judge someone's self-control by the amount of alchohol he drinks in an open-bar situation. This family passed with flying colors: I didn't see a single empty wineglass in their table section. I didn't even have to make an evaluation on how well they hold their liquor; the whole section didn't drink.

I hope I don't have to endure my psychosis at this wedding, like I did for my cousin Trace's. I had visual and auditory hallucinations during the whole ceremony, and intermittently through the reception. The doctors all say that stress is a trigger, but I don't believe that: the voices and visions come and go as they please. My stress increases as the frequency and intensity of my psychosis interferes with my life and puts time constraints on me. As my lucid time to accomplish tasks shrinks, everything becomes more complicated than it should be in my mind, and stokes the fires of my fits of depression and melancholy. I feel hopeless and helpless to their fury.

Every morning, I wake up to a world far different from the world before my slumber. My memories change in my dreams, and the disease rules me a little more than it did the night before. I can belie the pain of my condition to those who ask me; they don't want to hear my garbage any more than I want to live through it. Sometimes, I wish I could scream from the highest steeple that my life is hell, and I don't want to wake up to the different world I find certain in my future. That won't do any good, though. Everyone has a life to lead, and they don't need to know the conditions in my struggle, no matter how much I want them to understand me.


ANOTHER POEM I CALL HOME

Every poem has a bit of home.
Texas lurks large in my verses:
A state I could go back to,
Revisit the stage of my youth
When comfort was cacti and freedom
To hear the coyotes howl at night.

But those days and nights never were.
I was beaten and chided there;
The distant days of my early youth
Bore pain and sadness as my fruit.
The same bitter flesh and stale juice
Pass judgment then as they do now.