The Hanged Man’s Nous; A Note-taker’s Needle
As published in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 16 (1): 11-13.
Stigma. Tiny big bangs—“He shall suffer whatever Fate the dread Spinners
—Homer, Odyssey, 7.210-213
spun with their thread for him at his birth.”
the shrapnel of language: crude, caustic;
yet, applied surgical. The words
tumbling as gravel down my throat,
sitting sharp in the gut.
Non-specified psychosis.
Bipolar.
The capital thought.
Days of blistering depression.
The unquiet mind—weighted
by a single stone, Alejandra’s madness my own.
The price of which, its valued heft,
suffocates, cracks my lungs—
too weak from the emptiness,
the air of your bullshit—
collapsed on broken promises.
The pressure imprisoning,
as I gasp for oxygen.
And that incurable need
for humanity, un-consoled,
embittered; its warmth
locked away inside isolation-death-chambers.
Room 268. Sterile, windowless.
And from here, the universe’s heat-death palpable.
Abashed, breath-
wallowed, I witness
spiraling lint-flakes held in pirouette;
the barometers of time, slowly,
slip stagnant, agonized.
The insomnia tightens by locked jaw,
stiff muscles, and daggered teeth.
Drips of Haldol.
Sleep gives to
asphyxiations and aspirations:
the delirium sets in;
release nips at the livid tongue,
as I catalogue the contents
of the stars, one by one, on the walls.
My father’s rusty chisel, lucid raindrops
streaming down the glass, dark chocolate on Sundays,
sounds of her voice mixed into my writing—
That bittersweet foliage, the spine of remembrance
as fingernails piercing into concrete panels,
dividends etched by sheer will as I recounted
the bare thought of kissing her
under cold porches.
Every half-flutter of being,
recollected in the colliding of lips.
Those whispers.
All of them, deftly keen details…
swarming inside me,
digging into my experience.
These cartographies of consciousness—
projected as living fire,
the Proustian wit
of my collective history—
everything, as it sings and cinders,
leads me to the memory-ways of the soul.
I remember.
Why you put me here.
I am the abomination of reason.
The heart that will not die.
I tighten the noose
with the needle—
surrender to the psychosis,
feed its threads,
to see your worlds
cripple
at the birth
of these lines.
Here is a page for one of my manic writing sessions. The text may be hard to read—but may give a sense of the sensory experience and impression made during these encounters within one’s mindscape.
1) “Do not think of me as a messiah, a prince, or the like. I am none of these things; I am the child in a forgotten country starving to death.” 2) “The key to your worldview is in another worldview. The universal empathy (yes, empathy is an important faculty of humanity too). If you want to self-overcome.”.