Psychobabylon

Manet, Nina de Callias, 1873

for Maureen

"How are you even alive today?" she asked,

eyes popping out of her head,

body taut with dread and excitement.

I answered, "Because I write,

because I get to express myself while

looking for truth and justice."

(On the great American way, hey-hey,

the flat-beat drum across the plain,

the White Buffalo and the Wannabe...)

I'd come to see her because I needed help

getting off my pain meds, I wanted to

detox from a drug that had made me

even worse, hopeless and miserable,

with vertigo so deep I couldn't see straight,

rapid heart beat and blood pressure so low

the nurses always exclaimed, "Great!"

as they ripped the cuff off my arm.

(Maybe if I were an athlete in red Nike shorts,

doing warm-ups and five-mile days, but not the

pathetic gray lump sitting on this chair...)

I recounted for the new counselor

all the facts of my sad history,

the rapes, the violence, the mental illness,

the times I was hospitalized or homeless,

the frightened child, the abandoned infant.

She needed it all to assess what kind of
judgment I had in my debilitated state.

(And why I spilled the beans in that 

holy church, god only knows; I guess

memories get triggered easily in my world...)

I was triggered tonight by Spike Lee,

five years after Katrina: watching again how

the government turned their backs on the

black and poor, tore down their homes, 

closed their hospitals, left the mentally ill

adrift on the Gulf without a shithole or paddle,

shipped the rest off to Houston or Nevada.

(Left it to Sean Penn to drag the bodies out

and to Brad Pitt to rebuild the entire Ninth Ward,

and fuck the Army Corps of Engineers...)

I've been living like a corpse on the water:

For 14 years I've been stuck on a couch,

too sick and depressed to fend for myself,

driving up credit cards to afford bogus cures

because my government wouldn't invest enough

to find out if this was an AIDS-like retrovirus

as anyone who lived with it suspected it was.

("There's nothing wrong with your

autonomic nervous system!" "Thanks to oxycontin

you'll live in a box." "Don't sweat the small stuff!")

My doctors turned their heads,

turned them over to the head experts

because they didn't know what to look for,

not that the geniuses at Disease Control

had given them a handbook, but rather

told them we were neurotic and tired

and finally, furiously, they blamed us for it all.

(Isn't that what callous authority does

when it doesn't have the know-how?

It blames the victim...)

After that, you just stay home, you resist calling.

No matter how sick you get, you get through it.

You think, they've got nothing to offer me;

this is as good as it gets.

I may be housebound but I've got my films,

my music, my poems. I've got a kind husband who

brings me tea and kisses me on the forehead.

(Like an animal that gets sick, you want

to crawl away in the dark, but like a human being

you never forget your former life...)

Tonight I'm sailing down the Mississippi

on an old life raft patched with band-aids.

I'm still taking the pain meds. They want

me to see a psychiatrist next, assess the old

labels and chemical imbalances.

What I need is a miracle, a friend, and a
reasonably good doctor who believes me.

(Or I'll die like everybody else,

I'll go the way of old cfs-ers: a heart attack
or a gun and an old Indian song.)

We brown ones, we broken ones,

we Congolese girls, we Tanzanian fishermen,

we victims, we predators,

we addicted, we atheists,

we hungry, we homeless,

we gamblers, we murderers

we invalids, we children.

(Survival of the fittest in a
savage landscape, just so much water
in the common well...)

 
Mandan - Hidatsa Lodge, abandoned after smallpox outbreaks

Our day will come: http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ID/214944