--IT COULD MEAN PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY NOT IN THE SAME TIME PERIOD OR PLACE

                              

                                   The Thing About My Depression

 

My depression is irritable, antsy, having a lousy day, so I burrow into the charred ether, chin strapped to chest, another stooge impaled by Stockholm Syndrome. 

I watch the Shaman shape-shift into an eye tic, or deer tick distended on the front of my corneas that keep swelling, won’t stop pulsing, won’t have a thing to do with me.  Such cunning theatrics should be applauded and syndicated.

There’s an explosion above and beneath me like two planets crashing headlong while my chair splinters into a thousand jagged toothpicks.

And so I am lying flat-backed on the floor again, cold sober, feeling last, least, lost, shuddering stock-still, as the menagerie around me shatters like a sledgehammer to the teeth.

You’ve told me to call.  After all, the phone’s right there, a small chirping brick by my cheek, but it might as well be the boulders strapped to my ankles as I’m thrown overboard.  Still, I watch my fingers twitch stretch inch then curl right back, like a radish root turning conveniently in on itself, so that my depression need not snip off the loose ends this time.

In the walls, a herd of rats scamper and wrestle through the husky insulation, drunk on derision.  The lights percolate and pop like a migraine that means business.  Every atom wants a piece of the action, chuckling at the drowning clown.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is.  A bad hamburger could send a drill through Anthony’s skull.  Air and space is all it takes for me.

Sound of a plane engine rattling inside my head.  Sound of someone saying, Please take care.  Sound of someone else screaming in an alley perfumed with piss.  Sound of fourth grade, hooligans ringed around me, chanting hieroglyphics I can’t decipher.

Birds keep slamming into the window, smearing the view.  A dog driving my car takes a corner too sharp and cannonballs into the lake, killing every last fish.  An eagle flies by with another bloody jugular in its talons, not even bothering to wink this time around.

My neck is a stump, my legs two railroad ties, my body duct-taped to the swooning ground while a ticker tape parade rains down noose after noose, each one just my size.  

The clock looks aged and has psoriasis or leprosy, its hands now filaments of dust.  I look through a hole in the roof, at all that black black black expanding, the angels that were once there now too hungover to look below and see the flashing red lights, hear the wailing sirens, hear the wailing silence, hear the wail wail wail of nothing.

Sometimes this is what it feels like to carry a day, what it feels like feels like to lose it, and not even know why.