My Struggle with Bi-Polar Disorder

 Mary McCarthy

 

Drawing by Mary McCarthy

By Mary McCarthy

The poems here came out of a long struggle with bipolar disorder that almost took everything I had to survive. In the darkest time I wrote daily, the words becoming a lifeline, a ladder, something that might pull me up and out of the abyss I had fallen into. The drawing of the girl sitting at the cliff's edge, with all the ruins behind her, was the way it felt---no hope, no where to go but down. I was fortunate enough to have the support and determination, the resources, medical, personal, family, and creative, to survive the worst of it and build back my life. In my book I speak not only for and about myself but for and about so many others who suffer without the words that helped me understand and work my way through the pain and confusion of those years.

Outsiders
 
Not everyone can suffer
politely.
Some pain is clumsy
 
ugly as the troll
squatting in cold mud
under a lovely bridge.
 
I can’t blame you
for looking up,
some frogs just can’t be
 
kissed to transformation.
Like tricks that fail to convince
they embarrass
 
by staying what they are,
sad reminders
of how very little
 
magic you command.
Some suffering just makes you itch,
declaring itself like a bad rash,
 
irritating until it does
the only thing you can forgive
and fades away.
 
Not everyone gets over it
beats the odds
has no regrets-
 
some of us just
howl in the wasteland
outside the reach of grace.
 
 Unfit                                                            
(after a Hausa Bird Headdress)

She was an acre of tinder waiting for the match, would set her hair on fire and slap it out fast, a dramatic dare and rescue the wrong side of sane.
Followed by the smell of burning she marked everything she touched with fingerprints of ash.

She walked the alleys for hours. Those years most drinks came in glass bottles and every one she found she swung Hard and threw against a wall to hear it smash.

No one saw or stopped her and she left behind a trail of broken glass.
Trees spoke to her the way they speak to the deaf, in gestures and with the shapes of shadow and light splintering the air.

She knew each one she passed by its secret name, the path sap took from root to leaf, the way fog rested like a scarf around its shoulders, the way each day was a slow step in its long dance, the way they forgave her with new greens after each long winter’s freeze.
She had no guardian angel but a great bird, a shadow falling like an owl, silent and dark, swift and accurate as any raptor,  claw and beak and the hush of air coming down clean as a knife.

Even with that fierce eye, she was more crow than owl or eagle,  no diva but a canny scavenger, polishing her darks in the sun, voice a raw caw, neither the gull’s bold squack nor the long soft grief of the dove, her voice unfit for words in any language but the one she invented to speak to herself.

Arms spread like wings she wore her fury like a crown, a totem, a warning, a bird whose silent scream could turn men's bones to sand, leaving her there at last a Queen, triumphant and alone

Burn
 
When the gate drops
when the storm takes you
so high and far
all your ordinary days
shrink to insignificance
while the stars spin out
of their orbits
and you break free of gravity
rising like a new sun
spinning in the glory
of your own
inexhaustible fires
your heat expanding
until your farthest atoms
brush up against
the rim of the universe
where time and matter
took their first steps
out of the great nothing-
 
and you can only hold on
to your wild exaltation
even though this isn’t
your first time
and like the bull rider
you know the end will find you
thrown to the dust
torn flesh and broken bones
hard payment for that brief
ecstasy
 
Medication
 
Clears my head
damping me down until
all my noisy oppositions
go quiet and meek
and I grow calm
and sober as a gray
November day.
Good, you may think,
now we’ll really
get things done.
 
But I can’t help
remembering
what it was like
before my chemical
reformation
when every day
I wore carnival clothes
and thought
impossible things
going fast fast fast
as a bird’s heartbeat,
as the quiver of an insect’s
wing, as a rocket itching
to take off, as an engine
of desire, ready to win

Bad Medicine
 
What you need
they said
is a good hard knock
upside the head
a clean break
it will leave you
with a lot less
to complain about
 
Afterward I kept still
as a white mouse
on a live wire grid
embarrassed
by rooms where every
thing waited
blank and innocent
knocked clean of meaning
 
And they were right
with so little left
there was not much
to complain of
 
I kept close
in the naked rooms
folding what rags
of memory I had
into smaller and smaller
packages
 
hoping if I hid them
well enough
I could keep them
after the white light
burned out everything
behind my eyelids
and they would be
the only colors left
in a world flat as a negative
where I had no complaints
 
 
Enthralled

  for my sister, who always knew me, and never let me go                  
                                                           
I found myself lost                
black, mechanical,                 
an alien left behind.               
I had razor blades
instead of bones
beneath my skin.
I spoke in colors
words like sequins
breaking light
into smaller and smaller
fractions.
I had to sort you out
between the voices
of the trees, the grass
shouting and singing
sharp and dangerous
as fields of broken glass.
I came naked
feathered and spurred
my tongue baroque
unregulated,
my arms full
of awkward gifts:
apologies like small
black holes
swallowing worlds
blind spots white
as lepers
running fevers and other
sudden lightnings
hard to find room for
in any reasonable space.
But you held fast
through fire season,
keeping track
while I burned and raved,
a speed demon
racing through a thousand
changing shapes.
You held strong
laying claim
against enchantment.
You never blinked,
never saw
any face but mine,
rock steady,
waiting for me
underneath the shadow maze
of strange mutations
where I found myself
lost .  
 
The poems are from my book, How to Become Invisible (Kelsay Books) available on amazon, from Kelsay Books, and from me.