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Poetry • by Erin Soros
PLAY AUDIO VERSION: voice of Ally Fleming
Effects
Morning is slow time. Molasses
is a tired metaphor and you are
tired. Your language is tired.
The thick drip of
tired thought.
What new can you
conjure under the
weight of Abilify,
drug whose name
unnames itself.
Make a list of what
you want to write.
Want is another
word for lack.
Wont
is another word
for habit and yours
is to sit
by your laptop when
you wake to wait
for the drugs
to lift their veil.
You tried not to
breathe the smoke haze
in the kitchen with
the madman while you
typed his words, your
fingers fast as some
synonym you are
too tired to invent.
You gripped the shared
stubbornness of wanting.
His flat mate was the one
with the cigarette, those
stick clocks, their stagnant
yellow stink, his
fingers writing the air.
The madman with no cigarettes
had trouble composing his words
and you had trouble recalling wo
You are typing this
memory when the laptop
crashes and you
lose it.
So scratch black ink scrawl
like the desperate notes you
made in the psych ward.
Window
of that ward when
you were not free.
They took your belongings
in a blue bag brighter
than your eyes.
Grief sky
hooked your stomach.
Woe is the woman.
Ward of the state.
Every evening, blue
pill, pink pill, rectangle
and circle, child
colours, child shapes.
Itsy bitsy spider.
Stick with that
stubborn wish in
the kitchen with
the madman, your
fingers fast and his
flat mate
slow, those
Seroquel-
shuffled feet you
know.
Sara Quell. Suzie Q.
Baby heroin. In prison
the inmates give
cute names to pills
they swallow to slow
wanting and slack
feet ready to
run.
State unworded.
Ram
is gone blank
screen no
memory.
Abilify
you once
shouted to a friend
when you first clutched
the prescription, code
of some comic
book heroine
about to spin
into costume.
Now walk
with that
socked grit.
The cost
sanity
Try to write.
Tripped.
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[Distillate © HA&L + Erin Soros | {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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