"Running Away"--and mood update.

I don't need to write about my depression today, thank God, since it has been in abeyance for three days. My mood transitions, once the right medications are put in the gumball machine of my brain, are spectacularly sudden. As Elisa posted yesterday, "Welcome to Oz in technicolor."

And it's just like that--I step out of a black and white movie into technicolor. I'm suddenly on the other side of the interrogation room's one-way mirror, no longer in the room with its gray Formica desk and steel chairs barely softened by aging vinyl. It's like jumping off a cliff with the intent of suicide and suddenly discovering you've sprouted wings like Dedalus and can fly, or a fish out of water who suddenly discovers he can breathe air and tolerate the sun, a bear who steps into spring, forgetting his long, dark hibernation with the taste of his first salmonberry. You get the picture. I should mention the little bobble-headed statuette of St. Zyprexa I've glued to my dashboard. Give credit where credit is due.

Incidentally, and I just realized this, "Tonic" (the poem I posted yesterday) was actually the next in the rising to mania sequence of my ms. Sine Wave that I had been posting daily before my relapse. So, hoping my mood will continue euthymic, I'll post the next one in the sequence today, a poem I was not going to include in the ms. except that my editor, Kathleen, put it back in.



Running Away

I tried so hard today not to be depressed.
I bought my wife a mink,
told my boss he was a genius.
gave my shoes to the poor,
then took a bus with no destination
to wherever it didn’t go.

It dropped me in the suburbs
where hedges clawed and lawnmowers
growled at my chinos.
I took refuge in a garage
next to an old Lincoln
who smelled of rubber and oil.

“If you park at Disneyland,” he said,
“you can meet a lot of cars.”

I told him I wasn’t a car.

“Too bad,” he said.

When the garage door opener hummed
and sun puddled under the door
I pressed my bus transfer
to the Lincoln's windshield
but the driver ignored me.
Barely I bellied beneath
the descending door and ran
back to the bus stop.

The driver looked at me tenderly,
like a mother.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I recognize you.”

“No harm done,” I said. “Did anyone else?”

“Everyone,” he said, and tore up my transfer.


(unpublished)


Thine in gratefulness,

Craig Erick