Included as fuel
for my constant pirouette from one pole

to the other is now and then
seeing the shock of someone

who never knew till now how easily
my black and my red may blend together.

A mixed episode, they call it in the literature.
I call it a lively hell dance. I call it, wait,

don’t run away from me, please,
it’s not entirely my fault unless,

of course, it is; unless numbing sorrow
and its mad dash counterpart are my way

of living; is it a lifestyle choice?
Best of both worlds, worst

of your world? Come now, see
the acrobat tumble in mid-air

with both feet afraid to touch
the hot floor, afraid to fall through

into the falsely solid earth.
If you’ve never seen it before

let me assure you
those are indeed tears of happiness

salting my wounds, which are
mine all mine to either bind to heal

or push open and make over into mouths
crying in my skin. Maybe it’s a song

in dark and light to lead
a pirouette from verse to chorus.

Maybe you are right
to pull away as I cannot. 

To sit up all night
crying because no one asked you 
what you meant by something you said
that was thrown away by the listeners
in the flow of conversation

is to lie down in a field knowing
that you may look like a corpse
but since no one sees you out there
no one comes to see
if you are still alive.

To sit up all night
wondering why no one gets
any of your subtlety
when you metaphorically
gesture at your temple with a finger gun

then laugh it off as a joke
is to live in a ghost town
and one day fall into an old well,
breaking your self against the rock walls,
screaming for anyone other than a ghost to come.

To sit up all night
pretending to love yourself no matter
what you are or have been in the hope
that anyone seeing your effort will offer
to love you without condition

is to rise to the surface sputtering and choking
ten feet from shore, already beginning to sink again
but telling yourself the rising will continue until you
are high above the water in full flight
toward the stars.

From a study by researchers at the University of Oxford, 2014: “The average reduction in life expectancy in people with bipolar disorder is between nine and 20 years, while it is 10 to 20 years for schizophrenia, between nine and 24 years for drug and alcohol abuse, and around seven to 11 years for recurrent depression.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Wave I’ve ridden
since I was fifteen

lifts me into
a teary dream
in the dark, in bed.

Wave full of shapes,
threats, teeth;

wave that raised me.

Tears in the dark,
stifled tears increasing
the height of the wave;
within it the shapes, the teeth, 
the cold hunger 
I have pretended to love.

Hope

is just another 
shape in cold water,
something frightening
I can’t see, beyond
the trough of this wave,
coming in the next one
or the next, or never coming
at all.

Wave I’ve ridden
from teens to now.
Wave I ride is 
fifty-eight miles long
and counting. 

Doctors once said
it would fade
as I aged. Said the wave
would crest, that I’d make
landfall soon enough.

Doctors:

more shapes under 
the crest of the wave. More teeth
to cut into me.

Wave I’ve ridden since
I was young elevates me into
fearsome visibility under
a moon that will not eclipse
or take pity.

Lunatic, I call myself, lunatic
surfing horror waves
under the sobbing moon,
the laughing moon.

Waves upend me 
in the dark, in night.
Upside down,
suspended,
airless.

You’re not supposed
to be still up there
crying on the crest
of a wave,
say the better surfers.

Fifty-eight years in? I know this.

Fifty-eight years
in this surf, still can’t see
shore.

May be
time at last

to smash down,
to fall into those teeth,
to drown.