There are two people who live in my house
One hates the other
When she gets dressed she seathes with irrational rage
Undo good intentions, break promises, bury the light
Her reflection is an anathema
She didn’t ask to be
Born on a frigid wheel
Where half her life she is dunked in freezing water unable to breathe
And the other half sees the sun but knows she is soon to drown
Following the cycles of the moon like a lightning struck tree
Is hollow without its ghosts
They could be twins, she and me, but for the discrepancy
One is stable and reliable almost predictable
She can sit still too long, she can behave, she is smooth like a lucky pearl
The other doesn’t know what she’ll wake up as
Will it be full of a desire to hide from every living soul
Or flay herself
Or make love to her rage
Or sit quietly screaming picking at her scabs?
Will she try hard to “do what normals do” before floundering
And exposing
One by one
The unstitched hem of her irrationality and flounder
See, she knows it
The border and the line
Love and hate
Nice and fearsome
Just as she knows her eyes see too deep
Underneath the social lie
The polite surface
Where faux people demand to be trusted
And she’s never going to
One day pretend, the next day damned
Her mercury is poison only to those with expectation
She’d like to be stable but her emotions are daggers
They pierce at random
Paranoia, truth, paranoia, truth
Unfortunately she’s usually correct in her assessment
Of people and their shuffling tokenism
So burn brightly babies
You won’t eat her ashes tonight
She protects the girl who has a ragged heart
From further harm
She can’t ever be relied upon
She’s a convulsing spirit with no arm bands she can’t float
And it’s a lucky thing really
Since you seek to shatter her doupleganger
The last defense
Is usually your own
And I understand the broken
As they intuitively seek me
We eat our dinner together
Over broken conversation
And a shared silence where we need
No words to explain
Why children inherit
The mixture of right and wrong
Frayed souls, torn people
Pulled in two directions
First by others, then themselves
Carrying on the song
Of solid and insubstantial
You can destroy a person
And their pieces will reform
But they won’t be who they were meant to be
One watches the other
Wishing they could be reliable
And every day we wake
Unsure if we’ll want to live or self harm
The cut off a knife from your own hands
The stranger in the mirror when you look closely
At why you can’t act normal
And fit in with the world
One day pretend, the next day damned
Always amazing to see writing from you, lovely.
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A beautiful explanation of bi-polar !
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😉 thank you very much! I wanted to try to describe someone struggling with borderline personality disorder
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‘unstitched hem of her irrationality’ – so wonderfully descriptive, you clever poet, you 🙂
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Thank you so much it makes me so happy to hear you liked something I wrote R 💓
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But of course I do – how could I not ?!
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💓
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It’s not autobiographical. Many things writers write are not autobiographical. You shouldn’t take things so literally.
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Exquisitely painful – thank you Candice
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