So, this post is long overdue, but here it is at last! The best news I’ve received in a while!
Last year, my Freshman Year of college, I submitted two sets of poems to my school’s Humanities Writing Awards. And to my complete surprise, BOTH SETS WON AWARDS! One set is 5 poems about my own experience with Bipolar Disorder, and the other a sampling of 9 poems (Max & Bath) are from a book I’m working on called Alien Talk Shows.
Alien Talk Shows, as I’m planning it, is going to be split into sections about different characters and their lives, each section focusing on one or two particular mental illnesses. The poems featured are from the first section, which is about a woman with schizophrenia and her loving boyfriend (they later marry) that takes care of her and helps her take care of herself. He loves her and her illness, not despite her illness. I hope the other stories in the book will inspire people as well.
When I read these poems at the Western PA Undergraduate Literature Conference in the Spring, they received an overwhelmingly positive response. Many people in the audience even thanked me for addressing these topics. A girl came up to me after the reading and said, "I'm really glad you talked about schizophrenia, too. My mom is schizophrenic and it's so rare to see people with schizophrenia painted in a positive, nonthreatening light." And I agree with her. Media is quick to demonize people affected by mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia, which is what inspired me to write poems about schizophrenia and my own disorder in the first place.
If there is anything I would like people to know, it's that people affected by mental illness are just like you: we need love, we need care, we need acceptance, and sometimes, yes, we need a little help. And yes, we may need help more often than you'd like, but asking for help does not make us weak. It can literally save a life. I know it saved mine. I would not be in college right now if it weren't for therapy and my meds. I'd also like to remind everyone that we're not violent people: people affected by a mental illness are actually more likely to be victims of abuse. So keep that in mind the next time you automatically attach mental illness to brutal violence.
And without further ado, here are the poems:
Five Bipolar Poems.
Knowing.
Also! Stay tuned because I have plans for a few new posts:
Last year, my Freshman Year of college, I submitted two sets of poems to my school’s Humanities Writing Awards. And to my complete surprise, BOTH SETS WON AWARDS! One set is 5 poems about my own experience with Bipolar Disorder, and the other a sampling of 9 poems (Max & Bath) are from a book I’m working on called Alien Talk Shows.
Alien Talk Shows, as I’m planning it, is going to be split into sections about different characters and their lives, each section focusing on one or two particular mental illnesses. The poems featured are from the first section, which is about a woman with schizophrenia and her loving boyfriend (they later marry) that takes care of her and helps her take care of herself. He loves her and her illness, not despite her illness. I hope the other stories in the book will inspire people as well.
When I read these poems at the Western PA Undergraduate Literature Conference in the Spring, they received an overwhelmingly positive response. Many people in the audience even thanked me for addressing these topics. A girl came up to me after the reading and said, "I'm really glad you talked about schizophrenia, too. My mom is schizophrenic and it's so rare to see people with schizophrenia painted in a positive, nonthreatening light." And I agree with her. Media is quick to demonize people affected by mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia, which is what inspired me to write poems about schizophrenia and my own disorder in the first place.
If there is anything I would like people to know, it's that people affected by mental illness are just like you: we need love, we need care, we need acceptance, and sometimes, yes, we need a little help. And yes, we may need help more often than you'd like, but asking for help does not make us weak. It can literally save a life. I know it saved mine. I would not be in college right now if it weren't for therapy and my meds. I'd also like to remind everyone that we're not violent people: people affected by a mental illness are actually more likely to be victims of abuse. So keep that in mind the next time you automatically attach mental illness to brutal violence.
And without further ado, here are the poems:
Five Bipolar Poems.
Knowing.
In the time shortly after being diagnosed,
it will feel like validation or
Your worst fears
Being confirmed.
It will feel like you now have an explanation
Instead of an excuse,
Because you’re not just
Sad and mean,
You’re bipolar.
You will notice the electric pole by your childhood home
Is crooked,
And the light attached at the top oddly
flickers
at one a.m.
You will find it hard to think about anything else
Other than the fact that you now know
the light flickers and you watch it and you know
You’re bipolar.
You will find it hard to not tell people
who don’t know
Mid-conversation
Mid-chewing-your-food
Mid-anything,
“Hey, guess what.
Turns out,
I’m bipolar.”
You will run the streets at night and call yourself Queen
Because you know this town like the back of your hand and hey
wait one damn minute;
You’ve never seen that light
flicker
quite like that before.
And it will send you running
Down the hill
Faster than you ever ran before
run run run run run
catch it, catch a cold, catch your death,
who cares? you’re happy now.
take it all in.
And you will fall, you will
trip
and stove your ankle.
it won’t be broken and it won’t feel
quite like hell
and your face will be scraped, but hey!
you got to the light at the end,
down at
the bottom of the hill.
there was a priest there to greet me.
what about you?
did you see the rim of a beautiful white surplice and look up to hear the question
“what are you doing out so late young lady?”
with blood dripping off your face
and scrapes that you can’t feel,
you lift your sorry, numbed face up off the pavement and say
“Sorry,
I’m bipolar.”
mixed state.
I am the mason dixon line.
I am smiling, teeth touching lips
insincerely.
I feel the fire burning within me
as the acid eats away at
my feelings.
I am laughing while my stomach
wrenches with anxiety.
I’m ready to retch but you’d never see past
my smile.
you can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t.
You’ll have to look at my eyebrows
I’ve never had much control over them;
they grow wild,
they grow together like
emotions in a mixed state of mind;
one raised low and the other
plummets to height…
I feel that when it is day,
it is night.
I will retire to my bed when the sun begins its rise.
you know that feel like
when you’re in purgatory like
early morning
before assholes rush to work and clog up the streets
and the sky is a warning sign it's pink but slowly fades to
blue?
it feels like having a party when you have the flu
and eating when you’re not hungry just because you wanted something to do.
Life in a mixed state isn’t fun, it’s like,
everyone wants to light a match and burn something down but
rationally you know you shouldn’t be going around
starting forest fires
when it’s already hot out.
Emotionally Unavailable.
I checked into
an emotional hotel room,
and asked the receptionist to mark me as
unavailable.
Back then I was never sorry
your calls didn’t come through.
I was three floors high and
couldn’t handle you.
And you were never in my arms to drop, but
from that window where I could not hear your call,
I dropped you.
And in letting go I felt no consequence,
only what I know now was
sweet selfishness.
I am so sorry
that I did this,
that your legs are broken,
and that like an old umbrella, I struggle to open up for you
again.
Hospital. (This is one of my personal favorites).
I told my therapist I did not want to exist anymore.
I told her I wanted to be somewhere else, on another plane maybe—
not dead, just away from everything.
I told her I wanted to be babied for a while,
to feel like I was loved, and like I matter
even just a little bit.
though I have no love left to give,
so in return, I do not deserve it.
she asked if I had ever thought about going to the hospital
because it sounds like where I should be.
there would be a floor nurse,
someone always around to check on me.
and I could talk about anything I wanted
without feeling guilty.
someone would keep tabs on me for once
instead of the other way
and I might get control of my mighty fast
beating heart, my anxiety, and of mood swings.
I wanted to go. I wanted it so bad.
I wanted.
I dreamt of being cradled,
I dreamt of blue and whiteness,
I dreamt of high windows I could look out of
to see the city streets,
watching people drive by but
none would look up to watch me.
because we all have our own problems
and we’re all at
the hospital
because of them.
I understand
you have no time for me.
and I would wave, pretend you saw,
pretend I made your day.
it’s the small thoughts that count
I know you didn’t see me.
I damn near called and asked
what I could bring with me.
if my blanket would be okay,
if pieces of home were allowed though
home was the reason I was going.
it’s so hard to escape the hurt
when hurt becomes your way of living.
I settled for
the workers at the psych ward calling me
at seven p.m., seven a.m., p.m. again.
I missed the last two calls
but called back, lied, for the first time in while
just to get them off my back I told them
I was fine.
I went to bed and slept
from nine p.m. to two in the afternoon, and
hit snooze on my alarm too many times to count.
I took my meds before I went to bed but
they haven’t made me feel better.
I mean or else I wouldn’t be in this mess
and I’m not telling because I don’t want them to up my dose.
I feel bad about everything I do and everything I’ve ever done.
there’s a mass of guilt growing in my lungs
and my breaths are getting weak, I wheeze and sweat
but can’t seem to get this out of me yet.
I know
it will never really leave,
like a bezoar it collects.
what did I do
wrong
to be like this?
to deserve
the way I waffle back and forth
Is my hospital a place
does it even exist?
Is it doing my job and working to death?
is it wasting time? It can’t be
because I feel guilty about it I feel
guilty
for putting off things that hurt me.
I feel like shit for not wanting to deal with it
and everyone thinks that
I am weak.
I press my hand against the window
and outside I see a street.
I am at home.
I want to go to the hospital.
I want to be fixed and I want to be away for a while,
but I can’t go because
everyone says that’s ‘‘bad shit,’’ and that
I’m not crazy.
I know
it sounds bad
but hear me out:
that’s because it is.
and if it took an ambulance to prove to you
that I don’t feel okay…
have you even been listening?
was talking ever worth
what I had to say?
place beyond the pines.
I wanna go to that place,
That place beyond the pines.
I wanna be a ghost.
I wanna be dead but
I don’t wanna die.
I may say I am but
I wish I was fine.
Max and Bath:
Poems about a man and his schizophrenic girlfriend.
Note: Most poems are told from Bath’s perspective,
but some are told from Max’s perspective.
How to love your maniac.
There will be days
She wants to disappear
From everyone she knows
Or from the world…
There will be days she does nothing but cry.
She knows it doesn’t make sense, just listen.
You do,
And you’re surprised every time.
There will be days she is so high and inspiring,
That you wonder if she really is
The only
actual
angel
you’ve ever met.
On those days you have to dance with her,
You have to,
Because by now, you know these days
Are few and far between.
Most days she’ll joke about killing herself.
She’s tried four times already but now,
She doesn’t mean it.
She knows you’ve both found meaning in the grass,
And that’s why you stay with her,
Lay in it with her in the summer—
Even though you feel the bugs crawling into your hair,
You never jump up and shake them out because
Really, it would just scare her.
You don’t know what you love about her more,
Her good days
Or her bad days.
Both are full of their own wonder.
Some days words pour out of her body and her mouth
And other days it comes out in vomit and tear ducts.
She’s a Roman warrior,
Built canals for you to swim down,
And through them, she you led to the ocean she knows to be
God.
She always says everything goes back to the sea.
You don’t know what you love more,
Her poetry, or the fact that she let you see Heaven,
And not even just a peek, she gave you
A full view
And let you keep the key.
And she’s not even a locksmith,
Or a priest.
Max Afeara Mirra.
Max fears her mirror
When the lights are out,
She thinks Bloody Mary
Is coming to get her.
So she stands there with all bright lights
In her immediate vicinity
On.
And she flips her hair
Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth,
And back
And forth.
She’s afraid the ritual
Will summon her.
So every night after her shower
And shake,
The weak, wet hairs on the back of her neck
Fight and fight and find the strength
To stand up
Even when she can’t.
“Max,” I say,
“Bloody Mary’s just a myth,”
“You don’t know that,” she says,
“My friend knew a girl who died from that shit.”
In bed at night she hears noises.
“Something’s
Scratching at the door.”
“They’re trying the lock!”
“There’re footsteps on the floor.”
“Bath! Are you awake!? Bath!”
“Max,” I say, “Relax,
Your mind’s just acting up,
I promise
There’s no one outside
Or at the bedroom door.”
“Bath,” she says,
“Sometimes
You have to trust your instincts.”
She once prevented a break in with a butter knife;
Stabbed a man in the eye and a few times in the stomach
And I forgot to thank her
For using her instincts to protect us.
She’s a badass,
Maniac,
Psychopath,
And she’s all mine.
But most importantly,
She’s been acquitted of her crimes.
Thanks to the Pennsylvanian Castle Act,
She’s a queen with a spotless record in a soulless town
And we don’t even need a dog
To guard us at night.
Pieces of July.
Max got her diagnosis on the Fourth of July.
We sat in the psychologist’s office
When we should’ve been on amusement park rides.
She kept apologizing.
“Bath, I’m sorry.”
“Bath, I’m sorry.”
“Bath,
I’m sorry
I’m a waste of time.”
“It’s o.k., Max.
It’s not your fault.
I made the appointment,
And you are not a waste of time.
Change takes a while, and
Revolutions never fall quite on schedule
Until after they’ve been made holidays.”
She smiled her yellow teeth.
“Maybe one day we’ll celebrate
Your being free of
hallucinations,
guilt, suspicions,
depression,
panic attacks,
and sleepless nights.”
“But Bath,”
She said, before it happened,
“What if I have something
That last lifetimes and transcends
The logic of my own mind?
What if
I’m too weak to fight?”
“That’s why I’ll be
Right here, Max.
I love you now,
And I will love you
After the fact.”
“You’ll love me then?”
“I love you now,
I’ll love you then.”
The results came back.
My girlfriend
Is an
Anxious
Bipolar
Paranoid
Schizophrenic
Insomniac
And I have not many complaints about it,
I only wish that she would stop joking about choking
Herself with necklaces or phone cords or belts or ropes…
We set off fireworks to celebrate
That she finally knew for sure
What was going on within her.
We split the dark, small town July sky
Into a thousand little pieces
With her father’s illegal fireworks
And watched the clouds pass over train tracks
Until we fell asleep, blanketless,
In the green, green grass
Of his backyard.
Drifting off, she asked
“Bath, do you still love me?”
“Max,” I said, “I’ll love you
For the rest of existence.
I’ll love you
One thousand Fourths of July
And all the following Fifths.”
With me there, she had no fear
Of the bugs that might crawl
In her hair and down her arms.
She laid her head against my chest
And closed her eyes against
The backdrop the stars
And the deafening sound
Of our arrhythmic beating hearts.
I never needed apologies,
I needed to know you were o.k.
She sometimes thought
She could never be a writer
Or a poet.
She tried,
But she only filled her notebooks up with passive hate;
The only way she could let it out without
Hating herself
After learning that becoming external
Can sometimes turn
Internal.
She wrote
I hate you I hate you I hate you
In pretty blue bubble letters
With flowers and hearts and smiling faces
Drawn around the edges
And I never asked her who she was talking about.
We didn’t speak about the notebooks because I knew
Some days she hated everybody
She hated her mother, her sister and her father,
She hated her friends, and society and everyone she thought
was better than her.
Some days she hated me,
and God
and everything,
And some days
She even hated herself.
On the days she hated everyone,
I gave her space, because she would never hate the stars,
Or the grass
Or the waterfall in our backyard,
And I knew that when it rained she would pinken up like an earthworm
And come crawling back with all the apologies
I would never need.
I told her “Max,
You don’t have to be sorry for hating me
Or anyone. I know it’s only temporary.
I never needed your apologies,
I only ever needed
To know you were o.k.”
slow days
there are slow days,
days I want to get up and do things but I can only
go to the kitchen and pour myself another glass of green tea;
I drink them tall
I pretend they’re alcohol
I’m waiting
to black out
there are slow days
and I hate them and myself and everything
I feel the hatred in my stomach
it stings and does flips and I sit
waiting for the slow day to pass
there are slow days
I stare at window screens and nothing outside them
I stare at TV screens but not what’s behind them
and my eyes are glazed over, settled six centimeters deep
inside my skull there is an empty field in riot
the wind picks up and I hear nothing you say the first time you say it
I have wind chimes in my head that play on
endless
I can live with her because I’m a paramedic,
You just wouldn’t know it.
(emergency blanket.)
On a good day,
Max once told me
To remind her that
“You can’t be angry at the things you imagine
It never helps, only makes it worse,”
If she needed it.
That phrase is a warm, chrome
emergency blanket
In a first-aid kit of things she gave me with her lips
To combat her condition.
“Don’t let me rock back and forth,”
She said. “It’s pathetic.”
“Max it’s not pathetic,
You just have to find something
Better to do with yourself.
Scribble on paper or something,
Something… else.”
“When I keep tapping,
Or shaking my hands,
I want you to hold them,
Even if I yell and squirm
and tell you to stop.”
Those last words were her wedding vows to me
And the only words that ever came out of her mouth
Beautiful enough
To make her father cry
And I haven’t let go of her since.
Maybe Jesus was Schizophrenic. (My personal favorite from this set).
“I think this is the next phase in human evolution
And everyone’s just scared.
Even you’re scared of me, Bath.”
I. I did not admit to her
That there were times
She scared the living shit out of me,
Absolutely horrified me,
With the way she bent her body
And left it in the most
Uncomfortable looking positions,
Not moving for hours upon hours
Unless I took her limbs and repositioned them
For her.
And the screaming, the screaming she did,
Her eyes darting from one side to the other
And up and down and this way and that
Like she was in R.E.M. sleep with her eyelids wide open in broad daylight.
And the way she talked, too fast,
And sometimes she just trailed the fuck off,
Like her voice committed suicide
And her eyes would fill up with tears and on her face
Was written a look of pure terror,
And she’d tell me, “BATH!
Don’t look behind you!”
And I always knew there would be nothing there when I turned to look back but
There were times I thought,
What if there is? What if she’s right this time?
What will I do?
It’s hard to live when every day you have to ask yourself
If you can trust the person you love the most,
Even though the reason you can’t trust them
Is out of everyone’s control.
II. She thinks this is the next phase in human evolution.
She sees things no one else sees.
She has powers people are coming to take.
“I don’t think
it is,” I said,
Shaking my head.
“Christians used to think people like you were
Possessed.”
“Are you kidding? My mom still thinks it.
You don’t have to tell me twice.”
“The Greeks and Egyptians used to use
People like you
As oracles.”
“I know. I talk to God, too.”
“I know. You’re no oracle though.”
“I know. And I’m no prophet,
If I was, maybe my mother wouldn’t have kicked me out
For saying ‘Maybe Jesus was schizophrenic’.”
Indian Blood.
“Someone built a teepee in the mountains.
You believe that? A fucking teepee.
Look, right up there,” She said, pointing at it where it sat,
Up in the hills.
“There it is. A fucking teepee.”
“Yeah, it’s a teepee alright.”
The view was obscured by the mountains as we passed
The teepee, strategically placed
Completely out of view,
Unless you approached at a certain angle.
She thought it was really cool.
She said she’d wanna go up there
And live in that teepee
To be away from people.
“Whoever lives there probably wants to be left alone, though.
I get that.
I’ll leave them alone.”
My baby maybe has
Indian Blood.
High cheekbones and her hair’s jet black,
Her mother said she was born like that—
Dark and shiny and black as night.
She accused her of carrying demons in her.
She doesn’t. She’s just
Very expressive.
Max has told me she has people in her head
For every emotion, there is one representative.
Her Happiness is a feathered-up Algonquin chief.
When he drinks (because he is an alcoholic),
He gets very angry
And he wants to fight,
Fight everything.
But when he drinks she is so, so happy.
She just laughs and laughs and talks about
How much she loves everything.
She cries at the sight of birds
Skittering across the yard,
And when the sun comes out
From hiding behind a cloud,
There is no better gift on Earth.
But the Indian is miserable
And she can feel it
Deep in her heart.
She’s killed him several times
And he comes back, angry, burnt and scarred
But she likes the marks on his skin, because like his feathers,
They tell a story, only,
No one’s ever kind enough
To ask about them.
She kills him when he drinks too much.
Because of her father, she has no tolerance for alcoholics
And when he drinks too much, she gets manic.
“No one ever asks why we’re happy,”
Max once said to me, “I think people
Should ask. They ask why you feel everything else
And it’s funny because I never really have reasons
Why I feel the way I do. I just do.
I feel, the Indian drinks, and that’s all I know.
That’s good enough for me and you to know.”
“Do you feel bad about killing him a lot?”
I asked.
“Sometimes,” she said.
“I know I should want to be happy,
I should let him drink,
And fight,
And have my mind.
We took everything away from the Indians.
I should let him enjoy himself.
But if there’s no reason for it
What’s the point? What’s God
Trying to get at
Making me feel good
For no good reason?” she grumbled.
“Isn’t it good to just be happy sometimes?
Don’t you think?”
“No. Because it’s too much happy, and I know it.
It’s more than happy, and if you let me
I would clap my hands until they bled,
But you usually keep me
Pretty steady, no questions asked,
And I love you for that.
I just have to work on
Making the Indian quit.”
We had long passed the teepee and were closer to home
She leaned her head on my shoulder and asked
“Do you wanna live up in the mountains?
Get a teepee of our own?
I always wanted to live on the bare essentials.”
I laughed a little. “Yeah, maybe we will.
And we’ll invite him too.”
“Who?”
“Your Happiness, what’s his name?”
“Etchemin.
It means canoe man,
You know, because to make any woman happy
All you have to do
Is find the man
In the canoe.
And, Bath, my God, Bath,
You do.”
Everybody’s tired.
It’s o.k.
If you tire of me sometimes,
I tire of myself.
I tire of repeating in my head
“don’t swipe all the knickknacks off the shelf.”
I don’t know why I get so angry
I want to cry and break shit and burn things
But I never do the last one and rarely do the second.
I don’t know why I get so sad
I cry all day and lay in bed.
I get so mad I wasted time
But you can’t go back and change your mind.
I don’t know why my body hurts from doing nothing
And bothering no one
For days at a time and weeks on end.
I have bedsores where they’re hard to get.
So it’s o.k. if you tire of me sometimes,
I tire of myself
I tire of my hallucinations and of my reality
And I tire of trying to figure out
Where they separate and intersect.
So, there you have ‘em! Award winning poems by me, Samantha Yamrose. This is the first time in a while I’ve shared my writing online, so… my only request is that you please don’t steal or repost without crediting me! Please post a link back to here and write my name in the post! Not hard to do. 😊 Some of these still aren’t up to my own personal standards, but this is how they were submitted, and they won like this, so I thought I’d share. I hope you enjoyed them and are looking forward to seeing more of my work in the future, because I write about this kind of stuff a lot.
it will feel like validation or
Your worst fears
Being confirmed.
It will feel like you now have an explanation
Instead of an excuse,
Because you’re not just
Sad and mean,
You’re bipolar.
You will notice the electric pole by your childhood home
Is crooked,
And the light attached at the top oddly
flickers
at one a.m.
You will find it hard to think about anything else
Other than the fact that you now know
the light flickers and you watch it and you know
You’re bipolar.
You will find it hard to not tell people
who don’t know
Mid-conversation
Mid-chewing-your-food
Mid-anything,
“Hey, guess what.
Turns out,
I’m bipolar.”
You will run the streets at night and call yourself Queen
Because you know this town like the back of your hand and hey
wait one damn minute;
You’ve never seen that light
flicker
quite like that before.
And it will send you running
Down the hill
Faster than you ever ran before
run run run run run
catch it, catch a cold, catch your death,
who cares? you’re happy now.
take it all in.
And you will fall, you will
trip
and stove your ankle.
it won’t be broken and it won’t feel
quite like hell
and your face will be scraped, but hey!
you got to the light at the end,
down at
the bottom of the hill.
there was a priest there to greet me.
what about you?
did you see the rim of a beautiful white surplice and look up to hear the question
“what are you doing out so late young lady?”
with blood dripping off your face
and scrapes that you can’t feel,
you lift your sorry, numbed face up off the pavement and say
“Sorry,
I’m bipolar.”
mixed state.
I am the mason dixon line.
I am smiling, teeth touching lips
insincerely.
I feel the fire burning within me
as the acid eats away at
my feelings.
I am laughing while my stomach
wrenches with anxiety.
I’m ready to retch but you’d never see past
my smile.
you can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t.
You’ll have to look at my eyebrows
I’ve never had much control over them;
they grow wild,
they grow together like
emotions in a mixed state of mind;
one raised low and the other
plummets to height…
I feel that when it is day,
it is night.
I will retire to my bed when the sun begins its rise.
you know that feel like
when you’re in purgatory like
early morning
before assholes rush to work and clog up the streets
and the sky is a warning sign it's pink but slowly fades to
blue?
it feels like having a party when you have the flu
and eating when you’re not hungry just because you wanted something to do.
Life in a mixed state isn’t fun, it’s like,
everyone wants to light a match and burn something down but
rationally you know you shouldn’t be going around
starting forest fires
when it’s already hot out.
Emotionally Unavailable.
I checked into
an emotional hotel room,
and asked the receptionist to mark me as
unavailable.
Back then I was never sorry
your calls didn’t come through.
I was three floors high and
couldn’t handle you.
And you were never in my arms to drop, but
from that window where I could not hear your call,
I dropped you.
And in letting go I felt no consequence,
only what I know now was
sweet selfishness.
I am so sorry
that I did this,
that your legs are broken,
and that like an old umbrella, I struggle to open up for you
again.
Hospital. (This is one of my personal favorites).
I told my therapist I did not want to exist anymore.
I told her I wanted to be somewhere else, on another plane maybe—
not dead, just away from everything.
I told her I wanted to be babied for a while,
to feel like I was loved, and like I matter
even just a little bit.
though I have no love left to give,
so in return, I do not deserve it.
she asked if I had ever thought about going to the hospital
because it sounds like where I should be.
there would be a floor nurse,
someone always around to check on me.
and I could talk about anything I wanted
without feeling guilty.
someone would keep tabs on me for once
instead of the other way
and I might get control of my mighty fast
beating heart, my anxiety, and of mood swings.
I wanted to go. I wanted it so bad.
I wanted.
I dreamt of being cradled,
I dreamt of blue and whiteness,
I dreamt of high windows I could look out of
to see the city streets,
watching people drive by but
none would look up to watch me.
because we all have our own problems
and we’re all at
the hospital
because of them.
I understand
you have no time for me.
and I would wave, pretend you saw,
pretend I made your day.
it’s the small thoughts that count
I know you didn’t see me.
I damn near called and asked
what I could bring with me.
if my blanket would be okay,
if pieces of home were allowed though
home was the reason I was going.
it’s so hard to escape the hurt
when hurt becomes your way of living.
I settled for
the workers at the psych ward calling me
at seven p.m., seven a.m., p.m. again.
I missed the last two calls
but called back, lied, for the first time in while
just to get them off my back I told them
I was fine.
I went to bed and slept
from nine p.m. to two in the afternoon, and
hit snooze on my alarm too many times to count.
I took my meds before I went to bed but
they haven’t made me feel better.
I mean or else I wouldn’t be in this mess
and I’m not telling because I don’t want them to up my dose.
I feel bad about everything I do and everything I’ve ever done.
there’s a mass of guilt growing in my lungs
and my breaths are getting weak, I wheeze and sweat
but can’t seem to get this out of me yet.
I know
it will never really leave,
like a bezoar it collects.
what did I do
wrong
to be like this?
to deserve
the way I waffle back and forth
Is my hospital a place
does it even exist?
Is it doing my job and working to death?
is it wasting time? It can’t be
because I feel guilty about it I feel
guilty
for putting off things that hurt me.
I feel like shit for not wanting to deal with it
and everyone thinks that
I am weak.
I press my hand against the window
and outside I see a street.
I am at home.
I want to go to the hospital.
I want to be fixed and I want to be away for a while,
but I can’t go because
everyone says that’s ‘‘bad shit,’’ and that
I’m not crazy.
I know
it sounds bad
but hear me out:
that’s because it is.
and if it took an ambulance to prove to you
that I don’t feel okay…
have you even been listening?
was talking ever worth
what I had to say?
place beyond the pines.
I wanna go to that place,
That place beyond the pines.
I wanna be a ghost.
I wanna be dead but
I don’t wanna die.
I may say I am but
I wish I was fine.
Max and Bath:
Poems about a man and his schizophrenic girlfriend.
Note: Most poems are told from Bath’s perspective,
but some are told from Max’s perspective.
How to love your maniac.
There will be days
She wants to disappear
From everyone she knows
Or from the world…
There will be days she does nothing but cry.
She knows it doesn’t make sense, just listen.
You do,
And you’re surprised every time.
There will be days she is so high and inspiring,
That you wonder if she really is
The only
actual
angel
you’ve ever met.
On those days you have to dance with her,
You have to,
Because by now, you know these days
Are few and far between.
Most days she’ll joke about killing herself.
She’s tried four times already but now,
She doesn’t mean it.
She knows you’ve both found meaning in the grass,
And that’s why you stay with her,
Lay in it with her in the summer—
Even though you feel the bugs crawling into your hair,
You never jump up and shake them out because
Really, it would just scare her.
You don’t know what you love about her more,
Her good days
Or her bad days.
Both are full of their own wonder.
Some days words pour out of her body and her mouth
And other days it comes out in vomit and tear ducts.
She’s a Roman warrior,
Built canals for you to swim down,
And through them, she you led to the ocean she knows to be
God.
She always says everything goes back to the sea.
You don’t know what you love more,
Her poetry, or the fact that she let you see Heaven,
And not even just a peek, she gave you
A full view
And let you keep the key.
And she’s not even a locksmith,
Or a priest.
Max Afeara Mirra.
Max fears her mirror
When the lights are out,
She thinks Bloody Mary
Is coming to get her.
So she stands there with all bright lights
In her immediate vicinity
On.
And she flips her hair
Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth,
And back
And forth.
She’s afraid the ritual
Will summon her.
So every night after her shower
And shake,
The weak, wet hairs on the back of her neck
Fight and fight and find the strength
To stand up
Even when she can’t.
“Max,” I say,
“Bloody Mary’s just a myth,”
“You don’t know that,” she says,
“My friend knew a girl who died from that shit.”
In bed at night she hears noises.
“Something’s
Scratching at the door.”
“They’re trying the lock!”
“There’re footsteps on the floor.”
“Bath! Are you awake!? Bath!”
“Max,” I say, “Relax,
Your mind’s just acting up,
I promise
There’s no one outside
Or at the bedroom door.”
“Bath,” she says,
“Sometimes
You have to trust your instincts.”
She once prevented a break in with a butter knife;
Stabbed a man in the eye and a few times in the stomach
And I forgot to thank her
For using her instincts to protect us.
She’s a badass,
Maniac,
Psychopath,
And she’s all mine.
But most importantly,
She’s been acquitted of her crimes.
Thanks to the Pennsylvanian Castle Act,
She’s a queen with a spotless record in a soulless town
And we don’t even need a dog
To guard us at night.
Pieces of July.
Max got her diagnosis on the Fourth of July.
We sat in the psychologist’s office
When we should’ve been on amusement park rides.
She kept apologizing.
“Bath, I’m sorry.”
“Bath, I’m sorry.”
“Bath,
I’m sorry
I’m a waste of time.”
“It’s o.k., Max.
It’s not your fault.
I made the appointment,
And you are not a waste of time.
Change takes a while, and
Revolutions never fall quite on schedule
Until after they’ve been made holidays.”
She smiled her yellow teeth.
“Maybe one day we’ll celebrate
Your being free of
hallucinations,
guilt, suspicions,
depression,
panic attacks,
and sleepless nights.”
“But Bath,”
She said, before it happened,
“What if I have something
That last lifetimes and transcends
The logic of my own mind?
What if
I’m too weak to fight?”
“That’s why I’ll be
Right here, Max.
I love you now,
And I will love you
After the fact.”
“You’ll love me then?”
“I love you now,
I’ll love you then.”
The results came back.
My girlfriend
Is an
Anxious
Bipolar
Paranoid
Schizophrenic
Insomniac
And I have not many complaints about it,
I only wish that she would stop joking about choking
Herself with necklaces or phone cords or belts or ropes…
We set off fireworks to celebrate
That she finally knew for sure
What was going on within her.
We split the dark, small town July sky
Into a thousand little pieces
With her father’s illegal fireworks
And watched the clouds pass over train tracks
Until we fell asleep, blanketless,
In the green, green grass
Of his backyard.
Drifting off, she asked
“Bath, do you still love me?”
“Max,” I said, “I’ll love you
For the rest of existence.
I’ll love you
One thousand Fourths of July
And all the following Fifths.”
With me there, she had no fear
Of the bugs that might crawl
In her hair and down her arms.
She laid her head against my chest
And closed her eyes against
The backdrop the stars
And the deafening sound
Of our arrhythmic beating hearts.
I never needed apologies,
I needed to know you were o.k.
She sometimes thought
She could never be a writer
Or a poet.
She tried,
But she only filled her notebooks up with passive hate;
The only way she could let it out without
Hating herself
After learning that becoming external
Can sometimes turn
Internal.
She wrote
I hate you I hate you I hate you
In pretty blue bubble letters
With flowers and hearts and smiling faces
Drawn around the edges
And I never asked her who she was talking about.
We didn’t speak about the notebooks because I knew
Some days she hated everybody
She hated her mother, her sister and her father,
She hated her friends, and society and everyone she thought
was better than her.
Some days she hated me,
and God
and everything,
And some days
She even hated herself.
On the days she hated everyone,
I gave her space, because she would never hate the stars,
Or the grass
Or the waterfall in our backyard,
And I knew that when it rained she would pinken up like an earthworm
And come crawling back with all the apologies
I would never need.
I told her “Max,
You don’t have to be sorry for hating me
Or anyone. I know it’s only temporary.
I never needed your apologies,
I only ever needed
To know you were o.k.”
slow days
there are slow days,
days I want to get up and do things but I can only
go to the kitchen and pour myself another glass of green tea;
I drink them tall
I pretend they’re alcohol
I’m waiting
to black out
there are slow days
and I hate them and myself and everything
I feel the hatred in my stomach
it stings and does flips and I sit
waiting for the slow day to pass
there are slow days
I stare at window screens and nothing outside them
I stare at TV screens but not what’s behind them
and my eyes are glazed over, settled six centimeters deep
inside my skull there is an empty field in riot
the wind picks up and I hear nothing you say the first time you say it
I have wind chimes in my head that play on
endless
I can live with her because I’m a paramedic,
You just wouldn’t know it.
(emergency blanket.)
On a good day,
Max once told me
To remind her that
“You can’t be angry at the things you imagine
It never helps, only makes it worse,”
If she needed it.
That phrase is a warm, chrome
emergency blanket
In a first-aid kit of things she gave me with her lips
To combat her condition.
“Don’t let me rock back and forth,”
She said. “It’s pathetic.”
“Max it’s not pathetic,
You just have to find something
Better to do with yourself.
Scribble on paper or something,
Something… else.”
“When I keep tapping,
Or shaking my hands,
I want you to hold them,
Even if I yell and squirm
and tell you to stop.”
Those last words were her wedding vows to me
And the only words that ever came out of her mouth
Beautiful enough
To make her father cry
And I haven’t let go of her since.
Maybe Jesus was Schizophrenic. (My personal favorite from this set).
“I think this is the next phase in human evolution
And everyone’s just scared.
Even you’re scared of me, Bath.”
I. I did not admit to her
That there were times
She scared the living shit out of me,
Absolutely horrified me,
With the way she bent her body
And left it in the most
Uncomfortable looking positions,
Not moving for hours upon hours
Unless I took her limbs and repositioned them
For her.
And the screaming, the screaming she did,
Her eyes darting from one side to the other
And up and down and this way and that
Like she was in R.E.M. sleep with her eyelids wide open in broad daylight.
And the way she talked, too fast,
And sometimes she just trailed the fuck off,
Like her voice committed suicide
And her eyes would fill up with tears and on her face
Was written a look of pure terror,
And she’d tell me, “BATH!
Don’t look behind you!”
And I always knew there would be nothing there when I turned to look back but
There were times I thought,
What if there is? What if she’s right this time?
What will I do?
It’s hard to live when every day you have to ask yourself
If you can trust the person you love the most,
Even though the reason you can’t trust them
Is out of everyone’s control.
II. She thinks this is the next phase in human evolution.
She sees things no one else sees.
She has powers people are coming to take.
“I don’t think
it is,” I said,
Shaking my head.
“Christians used to think people like you were
Possessed.”
“Are you kidding? My mom still thinks it.
You don’t have to tell me twice.”
“The Greeks and Egyptians used to use
People like you
As oracles.”
“I know. I talk to God, too.”
“I know. You’re no oracle though.”
“I know. And I’m no prophet,
If I was, maybe my mother wouldn’t have kicked me out
For saying ‘Maybe Jesus was schizophrenic’.”
Indian Blood.
“Someone built a teepee in the mountains.
You believe that? A fucking teepee.
Look, right up there,” She said, pointing at it where it sat,
Up in the hills.
“There it is. A fucking teepee.”
“Yeah, it’s a teepee alright.”
The view was obscured by the mountains as we passed
The teepee, strategically placed
Completely out of view,
Unless you approached at a certain angle.
She thought it was really cool.
She said she’d wanna go up there
And live in that teepee
To be away from people.
“Whoever lives there probably wants to be left alone, though.
I get that.
I’ll leave them alone.”
My baby maybe has
Indian Blood.
High cheekbones and her hair’s jet black,
Her mother said she was born like that—
Dark and shiny and black as night.
She accused her of carrying demons in her.
She doesn’t. She’s just
Very expressive.
Max has told me she has people in her head
For every emotion, there is one representative.
Her Happiness is a feathered-up Algonquin chief.
When he drinks (because he is an alcoholic),
He gets very angry
And he wants to fight,
Fight everything.
But when he drinks she is so, so happy.
She just laughs and laughs and talks about
How much she loves everything.
She cries at the sight of birds
Skittering across the yard,
And when the sun comes out
From hiding behind a cloud,
There is no better gift on Earth.
But the Indian is miserable
And she can feel it
Deep in her heart.
She’s killed him several times
And he comes back, angry, burnt and scarred
But she likes the marks on his skin, because like his feathers,
They tell a story, only,
No one’s ever kind enough
To ask about them.
She kills him when he drinks too much.
Because of her father, she has no tolerance for alcoholics
And when he drinks too much, she gets manic.
“No one ever asks why we’re happy,”
Max once said to me, “I think people
Should ask. They ask why you feel everything else
And it’s funny because I never really have reasons
Why I feel the way I do. I just do.
I feel, the Indian drinks, and that’s all I know.
That’s good enough for me and you to know.”
“Do you feel bad about killing him a lot?”
I asked.
“Sometimes,” she said.
“I know I should want to be happy,
I should let him drink,
And fight,
And have my mind.
We took everything away from the Indians.
I should let him enjoy himself.
But if there’s no reason for it
What’s the point? What’s God
Trying to get at
Making me feel good
For no good reason?” she grumbled.
“Isn’t it good to just be happy sometimes?
Don’t you think?”
“No. Because it’s too much happy, and I know it.
It’s more than happy, and if you let me
I would clap my hands until they bled,
But you usually keep me
Pretty steady, no questions asked,
And I love you for that.
I just have to work on
Making the Indian quit.”
We had long passed the teepee and were closer to home
She leaned her head on my shoulder and asked
“Do you wanna live up in the mountains?
Get a teepee of our own?
I always wanted to live on the bare essentials.”
I laughed a little. “Yeah, maybe we will.
And we’ll invite him too.”
“Who?”
“Your Happiness, what’s his name?”
“Etchemin.
It means canoe man,
You know, because to make any woman happy
All you have to do
Is find the man
In the canoe.
And, Bath, my God, Bath,
You do.”
Everybody’s tired.
It’s o.k.
If you tire of me sometimes,
I tire of myself.
I tire of repeating in my head
“don’t swipe all the knickknacks off the shelf.”
I don’t know why I get so angry
I want to cry and break shit and burn things
But I never do the last one and rarely do the second.
I don’t know why I get so sad
I cry all day and lay in bed.
I get so mad I wasted time
But you can’t go back and change your mind.
I don’t know why my body hurts from doing nothing
And bothering no one
For days at a time and weeks on end.
I have bedsores where they’re hard to get.
So it’s o.k. if you tire of me sometimes,
I tire of myself
I tire of my hallucinations and of my reality
And I tire of trying to figure out
Where they separate and intersect.
So, there you have ‘em! Award winning poems by me, Samantha Yamrose. This is the first time in a while I’ve shared my writing online, so… my only request is that you please don’t steal or repost without crediting me! Please post a link back to here and write my name in the post! Not hard to do. 😊 Some of these still aren’t up to my own personal standards, but this is how they were submitted, and they won like this, so I thought I’d share. I hope you enjoyed them and are looking forward to seeing more of my work in the future, because I write about this kind of stuff a lot.
Also! Stay tuned because I have plans for a few new posts:
- What is Sadness?
- Why med checks are important
- Combating obsessive thoughts
- Navigating my first Manic episode
- Thoughts on how Mania can be productive: you are not useless
- Mental Illness as Nature's Coping Mechanism
- Another Mental Illness Poem Book!?:
Details on my plans for a series of poems focused on O.C.D. - Analysis of Creature Comfort by Arcade Fire
- Bipolarisms — listening to songs on repeat, being annoyed by breathing, and other weird things
- Is it P.M.D.D. or Bipolar Disorder?
- How to Fight Verbalized Stigma: Use your words!
- How to get shit done when you don't feel O.K.
That's all for now! Check back later for updates, I'll link to the new posts on this post as I write them. Thanks for reading! ♥
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