PoetrySz (poetry es zed) demystifying mental illness Issue 8

Shaela Phillips

Queen of the Mosquitoes

it was a late funeral
i carried poems hidden
in breast pockets
from all those angry years
no one taught me how to live

dandies fly off dark ivy swallows
into pits
gloomy
held captive
on the shores of barbicide
bubbled
curdled
putrid

a river of madness

where i drain my blood
from a small incision
for the leeches
hurry come and get it,
fast
run
smooth
into the quick sands
withdraw-ling my sickness
injected me with serum
to formulate attitude
under a bridge of armageddon
bye-bye sweetness

there are thickly boarded houses
settled on puddled dew drops
that call me by name
and know the history
that I have stored
from even my husband

the icy rivers through me
in red rock canyons
eaten mosquitoes

i blow on raw-hide
rolled into a bamboo flute
And call
to the woman in me
lost in the wildness

i make home
and shake the hand of peace
knitting my sweater
i am a free woman

bio:
Hello my name is Shaela Montague-Phillips. I am a student at Pittsburgh University. I begin having problems with depression when I was raped by a close family member and then I got married to my husband who was foster child and did know how to love so he was always drunk in the first few years of marriage. But now I have this fresher outlook on life and I am loving myself more and more each day.

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Martin Rutley

Disco Subtext

In the September gutters of
St. Petersburg 5:43 am
Twenty-second century clerks
Albino-aluminium
Sleep on slabs of
Vast inhuman endings
Like redneck poets typing
pavement anthems
Regurgitated people reaching
for concrete stars
Snowflake theories staining
Raskolnikov basements dressed
in Siberian fashion
Ritalin projects in the breathing
pages of naked books
The elaborate wreckage
of disco subtext

bio:
My name is Martin Rutley, I live in Manchester, England, and am 28 years old. I am influenced by several writers, but largely by certain writers from the beat generation. I have suffered from depression on and off for a large part of my adult life, but find that I am able to use this creatively.

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K. R. Copeland

The Poet's Spiral Notebook and the Noose

The poet, with notebook in hand,
failing to find inspiration in the humble surroundings
of his first floor flat,
turns toward the window for answers.
The scene he sees, the same.
The stately Sycamore
that has lived a hundred years or more
takes precedence.
The poet zeros in on one of the lower most branches,
which hosts a rope
that once served as a pulley for a piñata.
He pictures himself hanging lifelessly
from this remnant of birthday party past,
imagines that he'd jumped,
sees his flaccid body, slumped,
his bulging eyes
and gaping mouth,
his purple tinted pallor.
Disturbed, he shakes the image from his head.
His eyes fall back upon blank paper,
and once again, the poet struggles
for something to write…

bio:
K.R. Copeland is a self-taught poet, residing in Chicago Illinois, who suffers from bi-polar/ borderline personality disorder. Her work, which ranges from formal to experimental, heady to absurd, has been featured or is forthcoming in publications such as, Beginnings, Seeker, Dakota House Journal, Alternate Realities, Collective Insanity, Poetry Super Highway, Unlikely Stories, Decompositions, Snow Monkey, Niederngasse, and, The American Muse.

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Jack Cannon

The Buildings I've Built

Meaning
Incomprehensible studies
of afternoons and evenings
Twelve seconds from a childhood
vacation in the bottom
of an empty coffee cup
Tomorrow, I'll rebuild
my typewriter with
the welfare cheque
Sit on stone walls
dragged from vast melancholies
of orderly waiting rooms
Travel on empty buses
re-capturing myself
I'll throw my body
from the buildings I've built
and chat with Fathers whilst
their children are
being born

bio:
I have been writing for some years, and like to get below the surface, if I can, and take a look at things from a less common perspective.

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Dave Ruslander

Delusion

I sit on my red leather sofa
in the living room.
An oil painting hangs to my right;
to my left the gas logs burn.
But I can't shake the thought
that I am threadbare
sitting in the corner of a chinkless cabin
cold and hungry.

Hush

Listen
Do you hear plinks?
The sound pulls at my ears.
They are cobbling the road ahead.
One day we will meet them.

bio:
Dave Ruslander has bipolar disorder but is able to work and create. He lives on his horse farm in Virginia and works as a computer network engineer. He's been published in numerous e-zine and print publications.

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