Suicidal Sonnets Revised I-III

I spit out some rough sonnets, as the reader knows. I wanted to call them "Dark Sonnets" but now think that "Suicidal Sonnets" might sell better, though the alliterative marketing ploy does cheapen them a little. My purpose here is not to cheapen but improve them, as I shall now post the sonnets after adequate revision to render them passable if not good per se. One ought never to judge the merit of one's own work except in that case where some other no-talent-asshole gets lauded and you must scream that you are better, as I did with Robert Creeley, my late nemesis, who as a lyrical poet was every bit the equal of Helen Steiner Rice. My boast occurs in the essay, "My Struggle with Literary Narcissism."

Without further ado, the new, updated and currently revised author-sanctioned versions of "Suicidal Sonnets" in order as I get to them.


I

Once more this fell infection of the mind
Galls itself, one wound wears down another,
The crust of of failing surfaces will find
More cells to infiltrate, more smooth to smother.
I put a stethoscope upon my head
To eavesdrop on the stuttering machine,
Heard nothing but the clawing of the dead
Except a jukebox skipping in routine.
I thought of pills and blades and guns and cars,
The sordid images of methods used.
They haven’t answered “Is there life on Mars?”
As yet. From judgment shouldn’t I be recused
Until they do? I will endure this state
Patiently, though it kills me to wait.


II

I’m swallowed by the groaning of the reef
At one more wave’s untiring onslaught.
I listen to the outboard for relief,
A brighter racket than my pounding thought.
You there—do you think in straight lines?
Do thoughts follow each other, hand-to-hand?
Or is it that your insight’s without spines
Like a sea urchin’s skeleton on sand?
Vanilla life, vanilla in your veins,
Uncomplicated, unexamined days--
If only I could tender you the reins
To my life, would I sail through the quays
Sipping a gin fizz, waving to the shore?
I’d give my soul for your white bread rapport.


III

Passenger, conductor, does it matter?
Who can tell in such a blasted mood
Only broken by the wheels’ clatter,
spelling out in Morse the end of good?
To stand upon the platform with a noose
Is all I ask of life or hope of death.
The world’s wheels moved—I’m the caboose
Left on the track far from the engine’s breath.
Gather the spikes you used to lay the rails,
Gather the beams, the workmen, engineers,
Tell them that in all of life’s travails
A man is just the sum of his worst fears.
It suits me to be left behind, to rust
Else junk me outright. There’s no train I trust.


As to my mood, well what can I say? I had a few fair days over the weekend, I've felt marginally better since a calcium channel blocker medication was removed, but overall I feel fragile, uncertain, at times bored...I also have the sense of forestalling any major ambition or life changes, because I do not know what path I wish to take--further, I don't even know if the path I've taken thus far was more choice or chance. But that's the big one, isn't it? "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated." I take up God's preferences in my essay above on literary narcissism. It's worth reading because it takes issue with that age-old question, "Why him and not me?"

Maybe it comes down to birth order. As the second same-sex child I always felt left out, shunned, a tag-a-long at best. I expect to be rejected by the older children, to have to fight for my place and my rights. Suspicious, paranoid, at best circumspect--I just don't trust life. Do you? Do you have what Erik Erikson called "Basic trust?" Do you expect the universe to favor you? God bless you!

I belong to the other camp. The universe is a hard place, it takes guts to survive, nothing is given to you, things are rarely fair, give what you can but try not to invest your heart too much, it will be broken.

Of course, not physically bonding with one's mother makes for competition in causes, and memory is no sure thing, as I observed my bipolar daughter in infancy didn't want to physically bond with anybody at times; she always reserved discomfort in any situation and was unabashed to show it. When she was unhappy there was no comforting her. She had to wind down like a screaming clock. So blaming my mother for not physically bonding with me may not be true; mothers have always gotten too much credit and blame in psychology, but given their propinquity to the devlopmental process, it can hardly be helped.

Yet here we are. And the question of psychology is: How much can be healed? Some say all. Some say some. Some say virtually none.

I say it depends on how you define healing. For me healing equals acceptance: accepting an abusive father is the best I can do, letting go of judgment and fantasies of retribution, letting go of the question "why" and a host of other things that accompany true acceptance, along with the necessary forgiveness--but is this healing? I think not. Healing would be as if it never happened. All right, after an appendectomy you have a small scar--but in a miraculous healing you should have no scar at all. The tissue should have been completely restored. By this definition I do not believe in healing. I believe acceptance and integration are the best we can do. The more we accept the origin and cause of our negative automatic behaviors, the better we are at not performing them.

3 Kilorats,

CE

More Dark Sonnets

I continue in a state of suspended animation; I pass for normal when I have to; I suppress tears. I've thought of reading through my blog during my two-year depression to see what help I might find there, but I know the score. I have a genetically inherited biochemical disease that causes extreme and prolonged moods. Medications sometimes help. Electricity once helped. Mainly one must gut it out, endure. When I preach endurance to the depressed they are often disappointed. Of course everyone wants a cure. What if there is no cure? There isn't for bipolars, only management.

My psychiatrist returns next week. Two weeks ago he tripled my antispychotic medication. This hasn't helped a bit, I'm afraid. My thoughts are dark as licorice. Sometimes I laugh and surprise myself. I don't walk around with a sign on my head, "Suicidally Depressed: Caution." No, other people have enough problems and besides, to talk about depression often only makes it worse, why I always leave my shrink's office feeling worse. And casual acquaintances, unless afflicted by the disease, cannot understand.

I feel apologetic to be down here again.

But there's no one to apologize to and no one to blame.

It is what it is.

5 Kilorats,

CE

*****************************************

Again, I don't claim the poems below are good art. I do them for therapy, like crossword puzzles.


VIII

You want to die more than you want to live.
This is your state. You try not to let on.
You try to pass for you, careful to give
Distinct impressions than you’ve not withdrawn
From life into a cave. The cave is you.
You carry it around, a hermit crab
And send some chuckles up the nacreous flu
(Although the mausoleum’s rather drab.)
You’re only doing what you have to do
To engineer some cheer, to fool your friends
Into thinking you’re no more than blue
Or else distracted by important ends.
This dedicated sham can last for years.
Don’t ruin it by leaking pointless tears.


IX

I cannot take this illness seriously.
Manic-depression? My father’s family curse?
The experts have agreed imperiously
That of all sadnessess, nothing is worse.
First the depression, colder than a blade
Immersed in liquid nitrogen and held
Burning against a cheek, by self betrayed
Until the flesh and pain have formed a weld.
But that’s not it; that’s minor metaphor
Much too mediocre for malaise
In every cell, for darkness at the core
Of every gilded memory you raise.
You can’t remember hope. Why seek a cure?
For pain beyond pain only death is sure.


X

Who cares for me, how would I even know?
My beloved holds me with her eyes
And mine begin to tear. I would not show
The depths of my disease to one I prize
Above all others. Without her love, what then?
Deeper inside the spiral of my pain?
Scratching wretched hope out with my pen?
Institutionalized with the insane?
She is a luxury I don’t deserve.
How can she recall what I once was?
Somehow in her mind she must preserve
The outline of a man without these flaws
Of character or chemistry, you choose;
I’m too exhausted to explain my views.


XI

It’s not for flaw of character I weep
But for a flaw of chemistry, my dear.
Inside the gyri of my brain it creeps
Infecting all connections, engineer
Or all the darkest petals of the mind
Blighted and browned, hideous to behold,
A nightmare to myself, a melon rind
Upon a garbage heap deformed by mold.
The green fuzz on the peel is the thing
But fungus should only concern the dead.
I feel its hyphae in my reasoning;
Can’t someone suck this poison from my head?
If brain were foot I’d apply fungal cream.
Perhaps I should begin with trephining.


XII


Whenever my mind is not occupied
By something else, I think of suicide
And castigate myself for it; I ride
The pale horse, the monkey is my guide.
The monkey steers the horse, chattering loud.
The horse proceeds in circles round and round.
I gather up my history in a shroud.
The audience makes that sucking-in-breath sound.
Cheer! What a lovely word! An anodyne
For the purple cement that clogs my mind
And heart in a malevolent design
Of petty feedback loops, pause and rewind.
Where did the cheer go? Why am I insane?
Shut the monkey up! The horse is lame.

More Dark Sonnets

I don't feel very verbal but these sonnets leak out of me. I can't judge their worth for two reasons; I'm depressed and I'm the author. Think of them as therapy. No one could do a dark sonnet better than Gerard Manley Hopkins. I'm just toddling in his wake.


V

Put down the knife, Lady, the candle’s done.
You could not see to strike. Where is the blood?
It’s in your mind. Violence is outdone
By guilt’s black bile trickling where you stood.
Queen Melancholy with your steel-blue blade,
Whom did you try to murder but myself?
You’d add another trophy to your shelf.
But I resist. I will not be unmade.
“Depression” sounds as common as a cold.
Its remedies are legion as the dirt.
The soul-killer is worse than we were told;
Its black advance outflanks the deepest hurt.
Still I’d rather swallow pills in hope
Than to change my necktie for a rope.

VI

Hopkins said it best, “No worst there is none.”
But isn’t it hubristic to declare
That one has reached the limit of despair
As in a total eclipse of the sun?
In that event a wild corona glows
Around the edges of the blackened moon,
A fiery nimbus that as yet allows
More than pure darkness in the afternoon.
What if there is a worst? How will you deal
If what despair you’ve reached is christened hell
Before the devil gets in his appeal
To drag you down to regions still more fell?
It’s premature to label something worst
Unless the Lord himself pronounce you cursed.

VII

Ah suicide, your beauty exceeds all,
A blinding gown, a face so lightly veiled
That I can see your black glass eyes enthrall
An unsuspecting mark until inhaled.
Your hands, so fine, as if made for the harp
Cannot be clasped without making an end.
You strum a dirge irreverently sharp
Designed to cut deeper than we can mend,
Sharp as addiction or the death of love,
Hard as affliction, colder than hate’s hold.
The sickest kneel to you as if to move
Your soul to pity and die as they grow bold.
I hold back; beauty is as beauty does.
Why not give in? I only know “because.”

5 Kilorats,

CE

Dark Sonnets at 7 Kilorats

The spam bot attack seems to have calmed a bit, so I dare to post something new. I must delete the false posts by hand to keep this blog protected from being used as an advertising zombie.

So what momentous occasion has strengthened me to post again? You guessed it, depression. I began to slide around New Year's and of late it's become intense. I couldn't even talk to my sister or brother on the phone without crying, having to catch my breath to talk. I don't know if my older brother has ever heard me cry as an adult, and my sister has only witnessed it on rare occasions when my self-control could not hold. Kathleen, of course, hears it all the time.

I apologize on behalf of the other blog I started in a moment of normal mood--Best Poetry Online. My judgment is presently impaired regarding choices so I must postpone the resumption of that blog until I'm better--or not. Truthfully my judgment isn't so bad about others' work, just my own, which I find wholly execrable in depression, so perhaps it's just a lack of energy and hope. It takes me forever surfing the net to find one poem I think worthy of noting. So much passable stuff, so little outstanding. Much intelligence and little genius.

The best poem I wrote in the last year, IMHO, "The Whole Thing," was just rejected by Rattle after they had held it for two months and given me hope. More and more I get these notices, "I really liked this poem but the other editors..." as if everything is being selected by committee, the same process that produced an elephant or a camel, I can never decide. Such a democratic imposition on the selection process must militate against the most original poems, one would think. It takes one editor with vision to find something truly unique.

Below some sonnets I dashed off yesterday and today. Dark sonnets identified only by number. Not up to the standard of Gerard Manley Hopkins but what do I care? They are therapeutic exercises as I resort to formal verse when depressed.


I

Once more this grinding anxiety of mind
Galls itself, one plate wears down another.
The dust of dueling surfaces will find
More gears to infiltrate, more smooth to smother.
I put a stethescope upon my crown
To eavesdrop on the stuttering machine.
I hear nothing but silence in the town
Save for the jukebox skipping in routine.
I think of pills and blades and guns and cars
All useful in their way, pushed to the max—
As in my ragtop headed for the stars
Beyond the guard rail at Big Sur. Relax.
I have no plan, I will endure this rape
With dolls’ eyes and a positive thinking tape.


II

I’m swallowed by the groaning of the reef
At one more wave’s untiring onslaught.
I listen to a chain saw for relief,
A brighter racket than my pounding thought.
You who stand there—do you think in straight lines?
Do thoughts follow another, hand-to-hand?
Or is it that your insight’s without spines
Like a sea urchin’s skeleton on sand?
Vanilla life, vanilla in your veins,
Uncomplicated, unexamined days--
If only I could tender you the reins
To my life, would I sail through the quays
Sipping a gin fizz, waving to the shore?
I’d give my soul for your whitebread rapport.


III

Persecutor, victim, does it matter?
Logic self-destructs in such a mood
When self rags on itself in petty chatter
Begging only for the hangman’s hood.
To stand upon the platform with a noose
Is all I ask of life or hope of death.
The world’s wheels moved—I’m the caboose
Left on the track, far from the engine’s breath.
Gather the spikes you used to lay the rails,
Gather the beams, the workmen, engineers,
Tell them that in all of life’s travails
A man is just the sum of his worst fears.
It suits me to be left behind, to rust.
Why couple with a train I cannot trust?


IV

Here is my soul inside a water drop.
Place it on a slide, adjust the scope.
Look at all the creatures in that slop!
Crazy how life proliferates in hope.
Which corresponds to me? Bacterium
Stained blue, gram positive and walled?
Or is the dynoflagellate delirium
Of tendrils a better fit for the appalled?
Job wished he’d been aborted; I understand.
There should be limits to what man can suffer.
Unfortunately there’s no manual at hand
To say, “He’s had enough, don’t make it tougher.”
I’ve got more courage than the average bear.
If only it were more use in despair.


To any readers still following this blog, my thanks, and comments are always salutory as they assure me I am not entirely alone in the ether.

7 Kilorats,

CE