Mental Illness

MENTAL ILLNESS,  By john erik ege

At a funeral, the expectation is
I should be focused on my loss,
But I obsessed over the brunette,
Specifically, her tits, and the way
Her dress conformed to the contours
Of her body, pushed tight against her
By a breeze, my mind envious
Of the wind embracing her, filling her
And my mind with lust.
I want to trace the patterns
Of her stockings with my fingers, want
To bury my head under her dress.
The preacher’s voice is annoying.
Do we really need to be preached at?
At a funeral? I want sex!
I must be all kinds of broken.
I should be dead or jailed,
I think as I stand over my grandfather.
The casket couldn’t contain him.

I saw this on television:
A stroke turned a violent, prison
Inmate into a peaceful, brilliant artist.
Are we all just a seizure away from genius?
I want that! Not the one that transforms me
Into a vegetable, or puts me in this box.
I want a beautiful mind.
At least then, I’d have company.
Would autism free me?
Allow me to perform math miracles,
Play the piano, see other dimensions,
Raise the dead?
Then tamper with my brain, God!

“He looks good,” Mom said.
“Are you fucking mad?”
Everyone stares.  If I had Tourette’s,
I would be given a pass,
But that’s not my cross, either.
“Even at his sickest, he never looked so good
As when he was alive!”
The brunette sits, crosses her legs.
I pray for normalcy. I stare at the sun
Wanting to be blind.
***
Social isolation is being locked
In the bathroom at a party.
You can hear the others, but you can’t engage
Because it’s wrong to hold conversations
When you’re sitting on the pot.

Even when you emerge,
The shit sticks with you and
People seem to know it was you in there
Jerking off to the Sears catalog.
Would you shake my hand?

I feel invisible because people
Seem to avoid eye contact.
My mind is a medicine cabinet
Full of marbles behind a mirror
And I lie, waiting for someone,
Anyone, to discover me.

***

After 8 years, the cat trusts implicitly.
It doesn’t know I hold random thoughts of violence.
“I should cut her paws off!”
Rationally, I recognize the compulsion.
On good days, I ignore it.  On bad,
I mentally scream “CANCLE THAT” in an effort
To break the repetition of horror.

The cat is unperturbed by the perfectly parallel lines
Carved on my thigh, nor does it count the coins
I toss daily into the fountain of self loathing.
The preacher, my own family, says I’m evil.
I believe them, but the cat doesn’t care.
When I drunk myself into a stupor,
It walked on my back and cried
Till someone found me, and even tried
Burying my vomit, as if the carpet were kitty litter.
The cat sat by the door after the paramedics
Carried me off on a stretcher.
Had a human been so devoted,
I would have said she was broken, too.