Pill head this morning;
I’m going to let it wriggle
on my shoulders.  Let the scalp
seethe.

Don’t know what to call
the beings inside, but they’re not shy
about making themselves known.
They’re happy today.  They telegraph

their desire for release.  I arch my back
and close my eyes while they’re looking
for a door they never find, running
between my hair and skull.

Living is a problem
that demands a chalkboard.
Think of the angels of the pills
as the sound of the chalk.

Their equations tell me
how to adjust, recalculate,
cipher through the fog.  And
all that tiny, terrible screeching

is just the small, miraculous annoyance
I’ll suffer, not gladly but willingly,
on the way to solving for
a theory of how I can

just get up
and get out the door
every morning, come home,
create, and then sleep through the night.

Suckin’ em down —
bagels, English muffins,
half loaves of bread —

better than Prozac, better than
therapy,
hell, they are therapy —

“scientists theorize that
the craving for carbohydrates
is a symptom of clinical depression –”

of course it is.  I’ve breakfasted and lunched
my way through a lot of clinical depression.
My waistline is my safety agreement —

tells me, “keep me fat on hearty breads,
loaves, no fishes, no greens, no fruits —
I’ll make sure you’re too heavy for the rope,
too fat to reach for the gun under the mattress –”

It’s working.  It’s working!
I’ll have a cigarette and keep to the couch,
keep writing, keep at it,
crumb king, face full of baguette
for that existentialist atmosphere —

Goddamn,
I’m happy! 

close my eyes
for me, would you?
i can’t stop looking
and I should.

shut my mouth,
push the jaw hard, break it
if you have to.  i’m drawing
too much attention to myself. 

it’s not that i mean to be
such a spectacle, it’s just that
falling jumbles your control. 
the knobs whirl,

the switches reverse, the dials
spin uncalibrated through their cycles
and i don’t trust them anymore.
you would think i’d have enough experience

to right myself, but experience
isn’t always enough.  sometimes
it gets in the way of getting a grip
on an unfamilar disaster.  it makes me imagine

i’m strong, when strength
is the last thing i need right now.
what i need is to float and allow
myself to be pulled in and set right,

but i’m too married
to what i know to let that happen
right now, so if you can,
smack me like a television

or a static-pumping radio.
get me right.  move me out
of the sunspot storm.  give me
another chance, even if it just holds off

the inevitable for one day.
i can take it.  i’m used to dislocation
and pain.  it’s just that right now
even i know i look awful

and am not working right.
i just want one more shot
at self-correction. close my eyes, my mouth.
return me to my regular upright position.

I can’t
knock it off
or cut it out

It’s not perched
anywhere
I can strike it

and
if there’s a tumor or organ
where it’s staying
I can’t find it in order
to excise it

though I have tried
these violent means
before
they have not led
to a justifiable end

I must assume it lies
like a third dermis
under all of my skin
and removing it would require
a complete flaying
done slowly
leaving me in excruciating pain
unless I removed all my nerves too
pulling them out one by one
and then

how would I feel? and
would I still care
to try and live a new life
that way?

Science shows
on TV
often broadcast
film of bacteria
reproducing, one little rod
breaking into two, two into four,
and so on until the whole screen
boils with a multitude.

Lately, my mind’s
like that.
A mess of damage,
sinister charges rampant
on a shattered shield,
a damned germ orgy
of bills and issues,
stress and fearsome possibilities
and always, always,
an end
by my own hand
in plain and tempting view.

How does one cope
with that? One sets it
to running in reverse:
billions of hot words
fusing and reducing
into a few, then one:

enough.

Enough,
an exacting
answer to turmoil,
better than either
take me or
make it stop, neither surrender
nor supplication for outside help;

instead,
acknowledgment,  followed by
a choice to say
it is finished.

I say it deliberately
though I am full of fever
and prone to impulse,
crushing down
the fatal stirring
as if it were a pill under my tongue:

enough.

If someone were to make a film
of how sick this spirit can become
and how I move it
from death to health,

they’d see
simple arithmetic at work:
subtraction of rationale
followed by subtraction of guilt and self-hatred
until all that’s left is

enough.

Triumph over black mood,
enough.
Regulation of ill-ease,
enough.

Enough.
Calm storm, trigger peace.
Enough.

When they make the film
about how I have survived
my self,
it will be a still frame
centered on one small cell
holding something
waiting to disappear
in two syllables as soft as a gust
of spring:

enough.