Well Bottom Blues

Last Friday night I drank one cocktail (a bit strong) and one dropper of my THC tincture. When I went to bed I was looking for something to read and opened John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and it clicked for the first time in years. I wrote a half dozen lines, finished them the next day and read them at the Maple Leaf on Sunday to a polite reception. Got home and wrote another poem, my 2nd in seven years.

“I was cured, alright.”
— Alex DeLarge, A Clockwork Orange.

The above was a Facebook post from last Sunday. It seems I am somehow crawling out from under the shadow of Risperidone. I sorely needed some sort of intervention eight years ago, but what was chosen completely silenced the power of creative associative thought and language necessary to write.

I had to go look at the last prescription bottle to remember it’s been almost a year since I discontinued this drug, and not long after started this blog to chronicle what I hoped would be the road to recovering my full self. A glance at the timeline here shows I didn’t keep it up. There was no remarkable recovery. I continued as the productive, bill-paying drone I was for the last seven years..

Until last weekends sudden awakening.

Today I woke up from a restless night of stressful vivid dreams, and sat in my office chair staring at the pile of unopened mail and unfiled documents, piled atop the work laptop reminding me I must go back to my increasingly uncertain job. I sat paralyzed, feeling like someone had laid a large, lead blanket over me.

I recognized this state, and realized that perhaps I am cycling again. Rather that dispair and pick up the phone to make an appointment with the pill doctor, I resolved to find some way to manage this myself. Then I remember the germinal line of a poem which occurred to me as I fed the crow cousins their breakfast of raw peanuts. And I resolved to turn that line into a poem. And did.

I was cured alright.

If writing is the channel for a certain level of mania, and the cure for episodes of depression then I will not go back to psychopharmacology to resolve this. Instead I see a path to management that Risperidone robbed me of. I can manage this. I no longer live alone with my familiar deamon. I have my partner and sister to slap me upside the head if I beer too far off course.

Real recovery is not an absence of symptoms, but a return to my truer self .

Here’s the poem. Fine enough but not amazing enough to worry about wasting a chance at real publication elsewhere

.Whoops. I’ve revised the poem and submitted it somewhere. Sorry.

Here’s another ,the one I first wrote:

Maddox’s Ghost

For Thaddeus Conti

Seven years, enough for presumption

Of death, I’ve been I’ve been absent 

From the Maple Leaf poetry series.

Seven years. No word announced

Itself & demanded paper,

Propelled me to a microphone.

The good doctors of psychiatry

Pronounced me a bit too inspired,

Diagnosed the creative’s disease.

Associative thought strangled

By pharmacology (for my own good

They said, & at that time were right.)

My moon was too full

& all my nights went wrong

& ended with a go cup.

Take this, they said, and eat it.

It is your body of poetry

Which I gave up for who

We thought I should be,

with no suggestion

Of resurrection.

The deepest songs

Were lost to me. 

Poetry was a puzzle

I could no longer solve.

I once was drunk

On Dylan Thomas

& he was foreign as Welsh:

Berryman was an obtuse

Ladder I could not climb.

I devolved into work

& simple genre novels.

I revisited all of Pratchett.

& one night (the sixth

Instant, but who’s counting)

Searching for something

To read I opened Berryman

& somewhere the Frankenstein

Switch was thrown. Lightening

Flashed & then: I Am

Again, I realized. Current

Re-energized forgotten circuits.

I closed the book & wrote

A half dozen lines

I finished the next day.

I looked at what was written

& recognized myself

Reflected in a poem.

& so returned to the Leaf

& spoke my poem to

A half dozen familiars

When we were done

I asked for a dram

Of cheap well  Scotch

To toast the ghost

Of Everett Maddox.

“I don’t have a bar scotch;

JB is the cheapest,”

The bartender Reagan said.

I told her why I wanted

Bar Scotch, & she poured

A shot, no charge.

I went back to the patio

& toasted Everette

(whom I never met)

ghost to ghost

& poured most of it

Over his memorial stone.

My ghost dissolved

In that moment, &

I was back where

Once he spoke poems

& I was as happy

As Rutledge in the mud,

Buoyed by ultimates.