get that serotonin in me

This reminds me that tomorrow I have "meds clinic" instead of a regular visit with my p-doc. I never know how these sessions go. Sometimes I go and it's a teeny room crowded with professional looking men betrayed by their leg-joggling, sometimes it's like a bus just unloaded from a halfway house.

we'll see.

monday

Preoccupation with death.

Perceiving one's body as crippled,
lame, uglier than average,
more flawed than average,
useless, decrepit, defunct.

I will learn to walk with a cane,
I will fuck you like it will be the last time, like
this churning might break me
open at the hips.

homesick

i spend too much time looking at personal ads. lately i have so much trouble thinking of any possible reason anyone would date me. ok, sure, i'm damn cute, i'm smart, well-read, blah. but everytime i meet someone i like a lot they scoot as soon and they learn What I'm Really Like.

lately i feel like Jabba the Hut.

randomness

i'm only partially employed, and so i spend days in bed with a book, smoking pot out of apples, talking to my friends at their shitty desk jobs via gmail, which everyone has now. i openly disdain people who don't use it. minus fifteen with-it points. whatevs. i sport a little old lady hat i adopted from brown elephant and cheap knit gloves with the fingers cut off.

i am starting to accept that my current employment has rendered me temporarily if not permanently unboyfriendable. there were myriad factors already and i believe the mousetrap on the scrotum for the internets as a means of making money is just a final straw. the snowball. etc.

there's being sick, being an ex-crazy, being far tooo well-read, being hypersexual, being a comic book nerd, sci-fi reader, lover of vampire slayers, owner of multiple well-designed sex toys.

ghostface killah, lucero, magnetic fields. xena in bed. once a week i coach and costume primadonna amateur dominatrices thru a couple hours of dick torture. i make damn good cornbread. i have tattoos in elvish. i am a cultbanger.

the sads (how to fight loneliness)

After the equinox I have to take special care not to plunge into the depths of the black dog; doing this while detoxing from Lyrica is particularly obnoxious. I have to force myself to listen to the Arcade Fire instead of Otis Redding, I have to bore myself into cleaning my room, and I have to keep all the lights on full-blast as soon as dusk even hints at erasing shadows.

and then there's the weed maintenance program. Zak used to joke about it back when I was on Depakote and Risperdal and Effexor and all that other ridiculous shit.

-All you need is meditation and marijuana. And Doral menthol lights.

When he broke up with me, I burned myself numb for months. And then I started smoking pot again and things got a little bit easier to handle. He died three years ago right when I lost my shit. Sometimes I envy him. I'd never leave a mess for someone else to clean up like that, at least I'd like to think I wouldn't. I fantasize about just disappearing off to Canada to sit on a cushion and hum, but when the black dog starts howling I've started to look down at my arms and think about blistering heat and knife blades. I am only lucky not to be back home with the drinking and the pills.

Until things get better, or until they get worse, I'm going to only do things that make me feel better. I have to. this masochism is killing me.

I have a winter full of stoned evenings lying in bed listening to a blissed-out shoegazer mix ahead of me. That or red nights prodding at old scars.

scurvy

my teeth have grown unaccountably sharp.
I chew through my cheeks when I sleep.
I cannot stop prodding at the sore place with my tongue.

Poem for Monday, October 8, २००७

The Fall




by Heather McHugh






Gold leaf fell

to the rake and the fire.
Leaping headlong into those
upholstered yards, we couldn’t tell


rags from riches, loving a little
trash by nature, having
an orange crush. But love
becomes a set of pet


names, all diminutive,

and as for God,
we saw it was the dark
that made the stars. As time


went by,
the jeweled movement
of the loan shark’s car
would utterly impoverish the sky.








Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

too heavy

I'd love to detox off Lyrica. I can't tell if it's helping or not anymore. the weight gain has been around 10-15 lbs, just enough to make me hate my body palpably, bulimically, once again. at this point I'm not sure which is worse, the all-invading ache or the head-bashing mirror hatred. but when I read about cerebral edema and hallucinations it just makes me feel that much more helpless.

the worst part about being chronically ill is the complete disenfranchisement. i have no say in this. I am lucky if I can sucker my np for some codeine sizzurp when I am coughing up green shit. part of me thinks it's cos of the tattoos and the yard-long medical record with the state hospitalization and the crazy meds. I'm still in pain, y'know.

i mean, I stopped driving after I totalled my car stone sober in the middle of the day. I just didn't care how fast I was going or what I hit anymore. that sort of recklessness means I am either a total asshole or on the verge of suicidal, right?

i bought a whole bunch of fancy chinese diet tea. gonna try to eat nothing but brown rice and kimchi for a few days. meanwhile the hunger is as bad as it was with Effexor. i have to get off this shit. i dont care at this point if it helps or not. i have found that fibro pain plus self hatred are unbeatable. i give in.

my third rail.

working title

this body is all i have.

you do not understand this.
you can escape yours easily.
in sports. in sex. in sleep.

we have to walk slowly
when we drag this old thing around.


it is as heavy as grandmothers
heavy as heartbreak
as could have been
as midnight
& as luggage.

actually I am scared shitless

I was more than a little perturbed by the results of the study
published in April in the Journal of Neuroscience.

As a young woman (27) who has fibro, the next study I would like to
see would compare the brains of a group of fibro patients in their 30s
with the brains of normal people in their 70s. I am active, in good
shape, quite intelligent, take excellent care of my body and yet I
despair of living through another decade of this. What can I expect?
Are there any preventative measures I can take (for example,
Alzheimer's medication- would it help with the "fibro fog"?) or should
I start saving to go live in a retirement home when I'm 40? Why do I
know more about my disorder than the rheumatologist public health care
sends me to? Why are fibro patients sent to rheumatologists anyways,
when we clearly have a nerve/brain malady, rather than one of bone or
connective tissue?

No one is answering my questions.

very like a whale

Fibro is the opposite of bionic.

not quite Kevorkian...

Having fibromyalgia makes us reckless in ways that definitely seem to make clear the major diagnostic points of our particular neurosis. People with fibro tend to self-medicate.

When shopping at my new favorite, or my old neighborhood store I throw down a good chunk of change on supplements. I was at Sunflower a couple days ago and I noticed the Tyrosine and seeing as the label said it a nerve strengthener I bought some. Yesterday I woke up covered with a weird rash. Sure enough Tyrosine can cause hives and rashes. So I'm in to Howard Brown to get a cortisone shot and a scolding.

second snow of the season

today he left town to go take care of some loose ends back home. before I left for work, I rough-chopped a sackful of root vegtables and threw it in the Crock-Pot with some organic chicken broth, a smoked turkey leg from Del Rey, and half a packet of curry mix from the Pakistani place behind his building.

here's to never looking back

It's been just over a week since I packed up everything I owned and drove up to Chicago. I keep waiting for the bottom to fall out, for something bad to happen, for the homesickness to kick in, but really, everything is fine.