Mania

The correct thing to say right now is
"swirling."  Swirling. My head’s swirling,
or something in my head’s swirling, or
there’s something that seems the same
as swirling about the way my head feels.
In truth, nothing’s swirling at all up there,
unless you count the blood making a round
through the cortex as "swirling,"
or perhaps the single cells swirl
as they move through the veins and arteries.
I can imagine that they swirl in the tight space
of a capillary while making the exchange of oxygen
and nutrients through the walls. Perhaps
they swirl with joy, and the joy slips into the brain
and covers its membranes, and that fuels my feeling
that my head itself is swirling, or perhaps this is how
the word "swirling" came to be invented — it invented itself
as it pulled letters off of the blood and created the sound
of itself, letting itself echo in me as it shifts among the other words,
words like "responsibility" and "sleep," or whole sentences made of letters
brought to me by the blood, scratched into the folds
by rival neurotransmitters, serotonin waving its glinting switchblade
at the joy that creates the swirling before it disappears too fast into
the walls of the crevices to wait for another chance, and meanwhile
the swirling continues, dervish headspace, holy spring dance, name it
as you will, a pleasure I will pay for in dizziness as I imagine
how to say the things that will make the good part of the spin last
while letting the darkness that always follows it swirl off into
a place where it will lie, still and stolid, for as long as I can keep it there.