Step One – I am Mad
A poem that looks at the issue of medicating one’s brokenness. By the way I don’t smoke any more, but there are many other forms of medication. The picture is from Dylan Thomas’ Boathouse, another great self medicator. Gold and shadows and the force that drives the green fuse.
Step One—I Am Mad
I am mad
to stand outside
on cold mornings
and smoke crafty cigarettes.
Then to take
vitamins and little pearls
of garlic and cod-liver oil.
To run
on a machine, or tramp
though the valley with my dogs.
I take
blood pressure tablets,
feel the squeezing armband
of my systolic over diastolic,
and always the tension of my madness.
This
is the frontline
between my presence
or my disappearance from this world.
I wonder
what would it be like to relax
and not hold the tension between the two?
Between
mother and father,
harmful or healthy,
pressure and release.
To hold
left and right,
dark and light,
to wait for the reconciling third—
the
one who
walks between,
offering
inner dilation,
deep appreciation,
radical acceptance.
Where life
breathes over me
in moments of tranquility
without the need for nicotine.
Could this
be the road of returning sanity?
The way
to pass through the aperture
of freedom to an unforced future.
Where I
no longer store all that anxiety
in my neglected body and then have to medicate it.
Where I
can breathe it all out in a moment of relief.
Where the
deepest breath will fill the lungs of my deepest me.
Read More in ‘Arriving in Magic’ available on My Website