Coda: Recovery Journal

I have not recovered yet.

No, just the same poem again.

They give me a plastic bag for my possessions, clear so that everything's visible.

I sit outside the glass window of the nurse's office.

A way to say, the world is all too wide for me.

The poem cycles again, like the routines of counting and uncounting multiples of eight.

Checking in on a Friday evening, there are no doctors here until Monday.

Touching the door eight sets of eight times, filling the glass and pouring it out again and again.

Like just checking in.

Institution green, institution blue, under institution lighting.

The medical model of mental illness marks health and normal functioning as a goal, recovery the process of healing a pathology.

Like the way nothing stays checked.

The border of a body must be breeched to allow some room to breathe.

A switch that never feels turned off.

You’re medication resistant; so, we have to try ECT.

A repetition until it feels right (but you know never will).

Since my hospitalization and Form One detainment in October 2017, I have only written one poem.

Obsessions and compulsions begin to sound like rhymes.

Eight feels right.

Two quatrains of a repeated line.

Stop resisting.

Call this an obsessive-compulsive oulipo.

Inventories of imaginary rooms scribbled on receipts begin to spill off the counter.

Check the stove again, tap it despite a loss of faith in the memory of fingertips.

Stop repeating.

I keep coming back to the same poem when I try to write again.

I keep rehearsing the same tired lines.

Move along, now.

The Form One keeps me here for at least seventy-two hours.  

Sometimes, I become so involved with counting something that I forget about it entirely, the object lost in the abstraction of an attempted numerical surety.

I've cut myself, bandaged myself.

I've written recoveringly, written un-recoveringly.

Chronic cases disrupt a linear narration.

This is just to say, I've found a new way to write, a new language with which to describe a passionate unfolding.

Symptom and side-effect blur in the involuntary of muscles, the causeless of confusion, the chronic of brain zaps.

This is anxious attachment, you're scared, you cannot be alone.

Have you written anything lately?  

Am I allowed to leave?

Stop resisting the poem.

I've waited underwater for thirty-four years.

That's something.

To say, this much and no more.

Become lost in measuring the border line.

Heavy sighs while pacing the perimeter.

If I had to rationalize this, I would say that it is the last poem I remember writing that I liked.

Chemical tolerance and chemical dependence begin to blur.

But, really, it's just the last poem I wrote at all.

The doctor describes how, at this bridge, we break.

I keep checking in to see if I can borrow the momentum of a past, long-stilled body.

I hold some compulsions close, their gravity too much for any conversation to bear.

Stop repeating the poem.

Although I voluntarily admitted, I cannot leave now.

In DBT, people are taught two seemingly opposite strategies: acceptance (i.e., that their experiences and behaviours are valid), and change (i.e., that they have to make positive changes to manage emotions and move forward).

He describes in detail how the force of a fall dislocates the organs, sends the force into the softest parts.

Counting, like writing, is the organization of ideas into forgettable units.

At different stages I've changed phrasing, edited lineation, and added new and slightly variant ideas.

When you walk out this door you can decide to be happy, to not be anxious, to not obsess, to be a different person.

And yet, a chronic case at the border.

Self-harm is a shorthand for saying I've thrown myself to the wolves, see what big teeth they have.

Radically, I cannot be compassionate towards the infinite repetition.

I've rewritten the poem so many times I can no longer see it.

The long poem enacted not as an extended elaboration on a central theme or subject matter, but as a repetition of the same short poem.

Permanently imbalanced.

I re-write, recoveringly.

We take turns on the zoom call, awaiting our turn to digress and monopolize.

CBT, the email says, helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so you can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.

Having lost a baseline, I cannot judge a medication’s efficacy.

I'm literally obsessed.

It's up to you, it always has been.

Call this psychiatrically motivated constraint-based performance poetics.

Why have you been choosing to live like this?

I rehearse a litany against not writing.

We come to the problem of how to string one idea to the next.

Can't leave the house, can't brush my teeth.

The temporality of obsessions and compulsions script an elaborate ruse.

Call it an enactment of the title's tense progression.

At their worst, the compulsive acts become a danger to myself and others.

I've made to-do lists, I've checked off the items, yet I am still in this mess, underneath a pile of clothes and debris.

 I've come up short again.

The diagnostic name describes both an order and a disorder.

If you're asking if that's an obsessive thought or not, then it's probably an obsessive thought, Kit says from the other room.

Blue and white capsules of further complication.

To rush, counting out the necessary repetitions, sweaty-frantic, like when the roadrunner spins its legs so fast it, for seconds, goes nowhere; but in this windup there is no promise of forward motion, and the coyote sits, hungry but patient, waiting out unnecessary cycles.

Take the poem to the bridge, to the treeline, to the highway, to the crossbeams, to the doorjambs.

Rehearse and re-rehearse the ideational geographies.

I've lost confidence in the meds.

The term toxic has come to represent the person qua lost cause.

Someone who will only drag you down.

Conditions apply in the weather forecast.

A fellow patient walks by, stops, looks at me, shakes his head.

In each of these attempts to write something new I have never gotten past this poem.

Unreported side effects of just getting on with it.

I forget how to forget, how to move on, or I am endlessly rehearsing  methods to forget.

To seek too much, ask too much.

A placebo effect is still an effect.

To be too obsessive, too clingy, too diverse in symptomology.

Is researching the pathology a manifestation of the pathology?

On a high enough dose, I view myself from the third person.

The humours have become imbalanced.

These words are merely a re-enactments of those words.

First time being Formed? he asks.

Survival comes in many forms.

I am documenting the grammar of redundancy.

I am preserving the body in the process of its undoing.

An adverb describes how, in what manner, characterizes a condition of an elaborating state of being.

A complicated madness, consisting as it does of an overapplication of logic.

An overactive estimation of threat, they say.

Angry and quiet, I blank-face stare at the wall.

No response.

To fail to register, after a while.

I rewrite until I forgot that there's a difference between remembering and forgetting.

Intrusive thought, or poetic image?

A sense of control.

A symptom of recovery.

Tethered against a future uncertainty I cannot bear.

Stop resisting.

Stop repeating.  

Stop resisting the repetition of the poem.

I re-write, recoveringly.