We Mustn't Say We Are Non-Functional. There are Legal Ramifications.

I was so messed up the past few days. And today is better somewhat.

When you're poor in America, you get the medicine you can afford. You get used to clinics. Clinics are funny. They aren't patronizing, but they're often inept. They hire what they can afford, which isn't much. They are performing a great service so I treat them as the noble element they are.

But one can despair.

When you're poor in America, you learn to ration fear. You can't afford to freak out and pretend you have the same medical rights others do and go to an emergency room. You'll be putting your partner on the street with you, so just deal with it.

I hate this about my country. I was reading about Denmark. I wanted to write to them and beg them to let me move there.

They don't have a King anymore right. Or a Queen. Maybe I can be the Queen of Denmark. That would be nice.

Be creative. Barter. Beg. Make up a big lie.

I know. I know.

If you walk into an emergency room you can spend eight hours there (7.75 hours of that time waiting to be seen) then run up a 2,000 bill when all they did is give you a Tylenol. That is an absolutely true fact.

Or you can go to a clinic where an intern will tell you things that medicine believed in 1933, 1955 or 1988. They try. I don't get angry. I hide my laughter. It's not snide laughter.

I almost went everywhere. I almost went to Alaska. I almost went to Iceland. I almost went on a bus heading West with no destination.

I ended up going to my bed instead. Isn't that funny? It was certainly cheaper. Lifetime Movie Network, thank you for sparing me absolute confusion, finding myself staring at a whale and mumbling in tongues.

And now I can pay my mortgage and other bills. Because I didn't get on a train to Montreal or Alaska. So many lovely places to be lost. I wouldn't want to be lost here. If I'm going to end up babbling, walking the streets, I will at least pick a pretty city. Reyjkjavik is a good place to go mad, I think. And you can just drive the Ring Road out to a glacier and walk around a glacier explaining it all to yourself.

It is better to just go to the kitchen, I suppose. When my appetite finally returned.

The good news is I have a free diet plan. It's much better than exercise. I lose much faster this way.

Food looks very disgusting in that state. You can't even think of putting it in your mouth. And someone else eating? I have to leave the room.

I suspect I'm a sick puppy.

Bipolar is not fun, despite what some movies depict. Untreated bipolar is worse. You don't really have the same life expectancy as everybody else. Well there is no "everybody else" is there?

Insert "Goodbye Pisces" by Tori here.

Or maybe Ben Folds' "Narcolepsy." That would also do.

Okay, that's my self-pity post. I don't really pity myself because I try to find solutions everyday. I do have some survival tricks, or I wouldn't still have electricity, a computer, a house, the amenities. This is just the long damage control work the bipolar has to do to repair both the conflagrations he has created, and those that were just part of life's recurrent spontaneous combustion.

That would be funny. A commercial for insurance against spontaneous human combustion. It could feature a video of a woman walking her poodles and both the dog walker and the poodle would burst into sudden flames with narration in insurance man voice saying "DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU UNPREPARED!! You can get a $1,000,000 policy for only pennies a day!!" Show a kid on a see-saw and the kid on the other end goes up in a burst of flame dropping the other kid on his ass. Monty Python type stuff.

And the insurance company would make out like bandits (duh). Even in the few cases where the policy holder could demonstrate actual spontaneous human combustion, the insurance company could deduct the money allowed for cremation, since that already happened.

And vast amounts of people would buy this so they had the security that they were insured.

I remember when my coworker was so panicked last year because he had a minor illness and he couldn't afford his medical bills even with our insurance plan. The difference between insurance and no insurance is often very little difference today. And they keep adding things to the list that they won't cover. Mental illness is really passe, when it comes to insurance. You are allotted like four visits in a year sometimes. Mental illness is being reined in. Clearly. The roads to financial ruin are now so broad you can expect to see many of your well-to-do friends on them shortly.

I still don't regret the money I spent on poetry last week.

Because Messieurs de Chirico, Courbet and Schneeman entered my house on the same day and now I have the energy to open them and the sustenance is criminally beautiful.

The Elio Schneeman book is lovely.

Here are a few poems.

I am always drawn to poets who died young. Well, if they can write well.

I look for their books.

They never work you hard for reviews or anything....the living ones tend to do that more than a bit.

These are from Along the Rails.


    POEM

Next to the face of nothing
I sit facing
This shivering white wall



    IT

It has to find
what it is to think.
It must breathe
if it will speak.

You cannot hold ice
and sleep at the same time
It is a puzzling sequence
destroys whole blocks of tenements

where war rages
in its furious costume
It is sleep
that binds the day and night

It is alternating bands
It is a fleeting embrace
It is a kiss without touching a face.




    MUSEUMS

I love the holes in the sky
where my head goes
to meet you for coffee
you are lost in a sea of pronouns
you enter your dreams
as you would a giant museum
full of expectation
I love the holes in my head
they are full of pronouns
on their way to a museum
it's interesting to drink coffee
when everyone else is drinking beer
I want to live inside
someone else's museum
I've grown tired of the paintings
that dress the walls
you wake to the promise of coffee
last night I met you
in a museum in my dream
on the way to achieve
new and better holes.



and how's this for an elegy...

    GET WELL CARD

I write this in the garden planted beside your bed.