Tag: diagnosis

Teeming with truth is the garden pond beneath me,
little goldfishes and ginormous catfish sharing the same muck,
and breathing the same strangling air.
There is no poisoning permitted within their world,
no time for man-made deaths,
perilously cold, creations of old.

They have this amazing ability of not bumping into one another,
as though they understand the nature of truth-transportation,
within their minds, within their scales,
there lay the makings of something frantic yet strangely calming.
 
I unwind myself and my stress around the edges here,
simply speaking, as naked as marked by my worldly arrival,
I bear the tidings of youth and the addled nature of age,
paperweights upon my important documentation,
leafing through the pitfalls and milestones,
such a young age I was when it began,
much mental anguish to have unravelled.   
 
These documents are meant to reflect the truth
but they speak of others’ interpretations,
naught of my own cacophony and musings,
I am wound and wound by their looping,
their incoherent inked ramblings,
their medical terminology to describe
how I am presenting.
Nonsense! I am not a category three or five anything.
 
I am more like a butterfly in that storm,
where I gracefully flit to flit to dream to dream,
and explore the deft nature of mental health
and their well-versed world,
explanation upon explanation
of what I am,
what illness I have become
because, that’s just it,
labels weigh down, they laden.
 
A butterfly finds little comfort in human inscribed notes and details,
instead, she takes delight in soaring, higher and higher,
taking that particular note with her, and then,
with a release of her limbs,
the letter flutters down, further, and further,
until no one knows where it went.   
 
© 2020 Lauren M. Hancock. All rights reserved.
All images signed “LMH”
are copyrighted 2019-2020 by Lauren M. Hancock
and all rights reserved.

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