(Or Bi-Polar Disorder)

I. Depressive phase- 
   
I love you for your kindness first,
then for the peace in your eyes.
How could anyone as sure as you
not be the one sent to save me?
But save me from what?  
From doubt?  From myself?
You are God’s gift to me yet
I can't help it sometimes
I picture myself ten years down
the line with you not caring
and me destitute and homeless,
living on the streets, alone.

           When the transition comes
            I see it come and embrace it,
            picking up speed it screams over me
            like a snow white avalanche,
           a huge chemical ****** in my brain
           that cannot be stopped.

II. Manic phase-

Here I like to entertain myself
with vain fantasies of sainthood.
I’m standing and waving
to the faithful in Piazza San Pietro,
doing what’s necessary to secure
my martyr’s destiny in the after life
where I’ll have a place of honor
in the great hall of God, and through
a window in the floor I’ll be able
to see my mourners
filing past my gaudy reliquary,
crossing themselves as they gaze through
the philatory glass at the peaceful repose
of my sequin studded bones.

           *I have come to understand that
           this matter may never be settled.  
           I’d truly give anything for you
           to have  power enough to hold me
           in the middle, to hold me in
           the purple fog nothingness
           but I believe it tires you
           to prop up a puppet all day.
           You’d rather love me in each moment
           which is the truest love there is
           and that makes me the luckiest
           man on the face of the Earth.

Despondency
like a vampire
thrives on the night.
Pale as death
he never dies,
only sleeps
and wakes
to quench his thirst.

His chaos is
my redemption,
his constant roar
the blood
upon my brain,
he’s the only way
I know to feel alive
in a world full
of puppets.

Those who fear him
hang by string,
they stiffly dance
like living dead
with eyes wide
and unblinking,
wooden smiles painted
over worried frowns.

I have learned to
dance without string,
to stand strong
and wait for him
with arms upturned,
veins to the sky,
silent and still,
as reticent as a rood.

let him come to me
this night, there is
no fear, let him in.

The rest are all puppets.

Puppets on strings.

Puppets without a maker
to wish on falling stars.

In those first years
we spent a lot of time
in red corduroy chairs,
the ones that came with
the house on Turner Terrace.

I would sit and watch you
when you didn’t know
I was watching, constantly
looking for a crack in
your armor,
for a little snippet of the
***** you might become,

but I never found it
and it never happened.

Your little girl wonder
had me convinced that
the world in your hands
would be safe,

no death blows,
no mean streaks,
love's foundation set deep
never to be undone by
head games or hidden agendas,

and now all these years later
I am still transfixed by
your clarity,
your complete “sheerness”.

You are my priceless
dividend of peace finally paid
from a lifetime investment
in Faith,

you came to me
when Hope had gone
and Grace was silent,

and you love me
when you don’t even know it.

We bury them in flat graves
or convert them to ash
and wear them around our necks,
or place them in urns.

And what’s this about burial pods?
Your rotting corpse providing nutrients
to a tree that will one day be
cut down to make a casket
for the person that hung themselves
with their necklace of ash.

I recently read about
mechanically pressed ash
pressed so hard and
with so much pressure
that your loved one becomes
a diamond.
Albeit grey and dull,
and quite expensive.

Effectively if you die first
you can still be buried
with the one you love,
its almost like dying twice…

why do we no longer honor the dead?

Please don’t say an urn or a pod
or a flat marked grave honor the dead.
Google Highgate Cemetery.
Google The Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno
and you will understand the difference.

It is good to honor the dead.  

A death so honored that
a hundred years later
They’re as beautiful as ever.

Go,
look and see how beautiful it is
to honor the dead.