My mind dances and swirls the jive and the jitterbug skirting around a myriad of colourful thoughts and shapes and places that may or may not exist.
It lurches as if somewhere my rebel self has pulled the emergency break and comes to a screeching halt leaving me vacant and vague beyond the reach of this world.

My mind has within it realms filled with volcanoes, raging waters and cliff edges lined with gorse bushes and burns me, scalds me, swallows me up periodically or else some dark shadow of who I am pushes me over the edge and I fall into a kind of abyss.

My mind is alive and buzzing and builds ladders from words once spoken by kind mouths. My mind can call my name and ****** me back to life and whisper hope into my heart as it builds a ladder from nothingness and leads me from death.

My mind is beyond comprehension and yet simultaneously can be almost transparent and articulates itself to me with passion and such clarity.

My mind is more magical than Houdini, darker than living inside a top hat, more robust than the largest of diamonds, weaker than egg shell, contains more colours than a rainbow, its intricate, it has the ability to distort like fun house mirrors, it devours knowledge like chocolate cake, it can be sloth-like or ant-like in its focus and diligence in extremes, it’s Narnia and Wonderland and fallen fairy tales blended, poisoned and polished.

As a baby, my mind – sponge, soaked everything up and yet refused to be wrung out.
As a five-year-old my mind put Picasso and Carroll and Barrie to shame and built up worlds in which I could live, created threads and wove them into reality and forced prisms into my eyes so when the sun shone I saw everything in magnificent vibrant glorious spectrums of colour.

As a ten-year-old my mind built a court house - old style - judge, jury and executioner. It planted olive groves and slipped olive branches out through my mouth - they tasted like Brussel-sprouts - they made me gag but had to be endured as I passed them and myself between those around me, grasping my ideals that the world could be changed, hanging on for grim death.

As a teenager my mind opened wide, it came to life like a popup book, scenes remembered unfolding as if a gust of wind blew ferociously through it and yet my mind also closed the book, closed itself, locked the doors, bolted the windows and drew black velvet curtains until there was nothing but numb blankness. It made me grow wings, colourful and exotic and taught me to fly and I did fly higher and higher until the air grow too thin and my wings would wilt, feathers shedding as I would plummet, colours fading to greys and blacks and I would be scorched by red hot lava, fight for my life in violent seas and be thrown into the gorse bushes staring over the cliff edge into the abyss. Sometimes my mind pushed me over the edge, other times I balanced like a circus freak and other times I dared myself to fall and did. And then my mind would haunt me, punish me, berate me before gentle breathing into me - bringing me back to life.

And now, at twenty-five I find myself not wanting to run from my mind, not wanting to close it down or sedate it with medication. Instead, I watch it fascinated, horrified, feeling somewhat the ****** with the same morbid urges that makes one slow down and look at a car crash by the road. I am exhausted by it. I am frightened by it. I am intrigued by it. For the first time in my life I am letting my mind play out despite not knowing steps to that waltz I am trying to dance.

You need to let go, they said. Letting go will set you free;
you need to forgive.
I have forgiven: it just wont let go of me.

Precisely what makes you think I'm worth this anyway?
this time? these resources? this care?

Do you not smell the putrid rot, see the maggots of my madness?
The glass is half empty of milk -
curdling and spoiling on the mantle.
I have scrubbed well over a decade: it wont wash away.

Each night is a relentless gruelling warped dance of the damaged,
the steps are foreign and ****** the ever encroaching darkness,
I am not mine-

What can I bring you to impart clarity?
I have laid myself bare under both kind and cruel eyes;
let you um and hmmm at my broken heart, my tainted body -
and take a microscrope to the intricate spoils of my mind.
I have endured the indignity of supervised showers,
the callousness of those who have known nothing but love
submitted to regimes of drugs lined up like soldiers on the front line
and down one by one they went

And now beyond broken, I crumble to dust lost in the wreckage of myself
This tsunami of darkness mounts an assault so violent -
its merciless, it violates, I am imprisoned: silent scream.
The growing insanity reclaims me for its own: it gives me over to him.

Instinctively I recoil, squirm, curl up tight - futile foolishness.
It isn’t supposed to really be real. But perhaps I really do belong there.
I let her go. I am ready to let me go
Drained and pained, exhausted and alone.
How my mind betrays me; how my body fails me;
I berate myself for not being better, stronger, more acceptable.
I am a slave to the black dog.
He bites and ravages - savage being
feeding off the fear and hurt of the girl who was impossible to love.

The painful depths are beyond the grasp of language now
and every nerve is burning;
invisible fingers tighten around my throat and I choke on silence.
Hope’s whispers are lost in the roaring barrage of abuse.
I fear I am irretrievable; the ferocious love loaned out
never was returned leaving chunks gouged out of my heart.
I have fought for my life and drenched myself in knowledge.
But the war is savage and my ammo spent.

What is this demented tumultuous madness?
It burns, scorches, consumes with forced acid kisses.
I retreat into myself but find myself locked in a cage -
one to which I no longer have the key.
I fear I will never have my death of this, of him -
I’ve had my fill of being ill - of being owned by a man who came to ****.

I am dressed in a gown
A blue paper gown
With the ribbons tied at the front

A crepe paper gown
Open at the front
The kind you scrunch and fist into gift bags
Crepe paper, but thicker, like asking the deli man for a bigger slice

But the white deli paper is folded over my lap
A big paper towel, a napkin

I fell like silence breaking,
a scream that never made it out,
the wind folding around me
like arms that never did.

Now, I wake in a room
stitched with wires and cold light,
where the air tastes of bleach
and every surface hums with life
that isn’t mine.

The machine speak in beeps
soft, exact, unfeeling.
Beep.
I’m still here.
Beep.
I failed.
Beep.
I failed.

They say the sound is good.
They say the beeping means I’m stable.
But it only reminds me
that death didn’t want me.
That earth opened its arms
and still let me go.

The noise wraps around my head
like a shroud of neon thread.
It winds through the hollow
in my chest,
settling where the fall had emptied me.

I hate its voice,
its small, insistent hope.
It has no right to be so calm
when everything inside me
is still falling.

I close my eyes,
but there’s no peace.
Just the beep,
beep,
beep,
dragging me back
from the edge I chose.

And I want to ask the silence
why it let me go.
Why it handed me back
to this world of white and wires,
to these strangers with clipped voices
and pity in their eyes.

But silence won’t speak here.
Only the machines do.

Beep.
I’m still alive.
Beep.
I’m still alive.
Beep.
God, why?

You staggered through the double doors,
a trail of red on bleached-out floors.
The night was humming, wet and mean,
your busted life in Trauma Green.

I clamped your vein, soft as thread,
and dared the gods to count their dead.
You lay there broken, no ID,
just blood and ache and urgency.

Your heart fell quiet
inside my hand,
as if it paused to understand.
Then breath returned in stuttered moans.
your chest arched up to meet my own.

The wound was sealed.
Your sigh came slow.
You could have left.
You didn’t, though.
The sweat still clung.
Your gaze went slack.
You pulled the gown and turned your back.

I saw you later, checkout nine:
frozen dinners, boxed red wine.
You seemed like someone death forgot,
barely awake, missing the plot.

You looked right through. You didn’t know
the hands that pulled you from below.
You don’t remember. I can’t forget
how thin the stitch, how deep the debt.