Lithium, Tryptizol, and Me

When the dark hours visit me,
they swing in on elastic strings,
drawn back so far to a point in time
I can hear them approach merely as a whisper,
then accelerate so slowly to a boom;
over weeks. A message from an old friend,
once a menace and all enemies in one.
Because they have a certainty, like an orrery.
I will be whipped into a distance unlimited
by three dimensions yet must settle
in the curvature of my inner space.
My thoughts race like the wind,
until all energy has expired;
I will lay down and curl into a ball.

Medication is no non-pareil,
it is succour for inner beasts
to lie still for just a while.
Would that they wished it so
I tell myself in the whisky mist,
where I have invented a force field in my name.
Nothing, never nothing can jump out
and scrape the thin skin I must wear,
on the real earth when depression calls.

I have my own history,
memories of childhood missions;
it is identity I must find.
Old pictures missed a trick in my room,
heroes none, only glory in the end
from fakes draped in the dust of oblivion;
a squad of pinpricks on the globe of astronomy.
I knew this and slipped off to my event horizon,
fired synapses from inner worlds to infinity,
stripped down to early cosmic metal.
Particles without names yet knew their place
in wider schemes of things;
Cooling slowly into heroes there.
I was fundamental to it all.

Here I sit, wonder if I am real,
my window high above the streets
where earthlings scuttle on by,
look to the sky and know,
when gamma rays place me in the pit
I must stay awake until the daybreak,
drop asleep until the lights go out.
Rise again to view the Great Bear,
drink whisky then tour the cosmic halls;
search for my name.

by Pater