Is This Scary? Read online

  Is This Scary?

  Poems

  Jacob Scheier

  Dedication

  Dear Sam, This Isn’t a Suicide Note

  Palinopsia Song or Ode to Some Fucking Bird

  Ode to Prednisone

  Crohn’s Song

  Symptoms Include a Compulsive Desire to be Understood

  Poem for a Broken Bone

  Election Night in the Ward

  Ode to Zopiclone

  To My Friends Who Did Not Visit Me in the Mental Hospital

  Circular Labyrinth

  The Chestnut Tree Café

  Self-Parenting

  Noonday Yahweh

  Song for a Colonoscopy

  The Spaz

  To a Child Whose Mother Has Not Yet Died

  Song to the Suicides

  Note

  Metamorphosis

  Jumbo Elegy

  God as We Understood Him

  On Missing a Train Stop

  Songs from an Emergency Room

  Nearly 50% of Toronto Islands underwater after recent deluge of rain: City

  In Praise of Losing Things

  Ode to Remicade

  Infusion Song

  And Then Job Answered God from inside the Whirlwind They Were Both Caught inside Of

  Job’s Girlfriend

  Lamotrigine Song

  Re: hey, and i might have cancer

  Harold and Maude Revisited

  Wanting to Not Want to Die

  My Last Depression

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  For Brad

  Dear Sam, This Isn’t a Suicide Note

  In a way, it’s an anti-suicide letter.

  But I understand if you don’t read it

  because you may have already killed yourself

  as we agreed was your right. We saw it the same way

  during that war on ourselves or, to be more straightforward,

  the Psych Ward. There were plenty of atheists

  in that foxhole, not to mention the occasional Satanist

  like the Zyprexa-shut-eyed girl

  who lost internet privileges for feeding

  her psychosis on occult sites. But they

  didn’t take away my copy of The Divine Comedy

  because it was Christian I guess

  and I was merely depressed.

  You were the only unmedicated person on the floor.

  First mental patient I’ve ever known diagnosed

  purely with an existential crisis. Though when a resident

  mentioned Cymbalta, you were adamant:

  didn’t want a pill to take away what little you felt,

  even if it was pain. I wondered,

  doing my best Mrs. Ramsay, if the right med

  could make you see a silvered, rough wave

  and proclaim, It is enough! It is enough!

  But didn’t say so, as I hadn’t read

  To the Lighthouse since this condition

  caused waves to appear sharp, jagged. Like everything else

  in this world, piercing. And you had a point

  about the pill. Neither the benzos nor gaba-

  pentin had caused me to give up entirely

  on the idea of suicide.

  The most well-groomed

  mental patient I ever saw, you must have shaved

  every day before breakfast. Your neck gleamed

  in your colour-guarded

  V-necks. With my sagging beard

  and untamed blond hair, I looked like Christ

  but mean. Every night we walked the same square

  of corridor. We discussed Camus more than Woolf.

  You said you had to draw a line somewhere—

  at the small but stifling compromises that

  add up then suddenly define a life.

  And of course there was a woman

  who loved you but also didn’t.

  On one of my day passes

  I bought you Chekhov’s Selected

  because I was sure you were in it.

  My inscription said, because

  you had mentioned it

  as an alternative, Move to Russia.

  Don’t kill yourself. I didn’t

  sign my name. I told you my plans

  when I got out: therapy, MBCT, volunteer

  somewhere, find god, keep busy. You said

  I had a lot of will and I agreed, but

  my real issue was a lack

  of faith. We could both quote from The Myth

  of Sisyphus. I read it

  when my life felt relatively full, agreed

  then with Camus and thought living worth it.

  You read it a few weeks before you tried.

  These days we’re both on the outside. Yesterday,

  we met at the Starbucks as we would on hour-long passes

  but now returned to it as free men with all the time

  in this world. It might have been the last day

  I’ll ever see you but that’s true

  of so many people who enter

  and exit our lives. Couldn’t they all have

  killed themselves by now? I like

  what you said about drawing a line,

  which is not the same as agreeing with it.

  Maybe, you are the only person I’ve met

  who isn’t afraid to die. Though I might ask

  if, like me, on the evening I took myself

  to lie beneath that willow tree, you are afraid

  of life. Over lattes you reminded me

  of the Dante line I often quoted in the corridor:

  There is no greater sorrow than to recall

  our times of joy in wretchedness. Neither of us

  can listen to music. It hurts in a way

  we can’t explain but understand

  when the other says it. Time passes

  for you, I imagine, as you smoke and look out

  at the lake from your condo, a glass palace

  with a name like Solaris, advertising an adventure

  in urban solitude. I tell you how on the night of your attempt

  you were the Dorian Gray behind the condo ad,

  drinking on your leather sofa with a bottle

  of fine whiskey and a stomach full of pills.

  And you laugh. You really don’t

  do much else but smoke and wait

  for something to change. The only structure

  in your life now is when a nurse comes

  to dress slept-through wounds

  made by days on the hardwood.

  During one of our marathons,

  talking around the corridors, I observed

  we were lost in a circular labyrinth. You said

  it was a pretty good metaphor. I said

  when I get out of here I might use it in a poem.

  Thought, but didn’t say, I would dedicate

  the poem to you, wondering if it might be

  an elegy. By the time I wrote it, I figured

  I could, assuming you were still alive, tell you

  what we found in the labyrinth. Something like

  we just needed to kill the part of us

  that wanted to die. Bu
t I still don’t have a strong case

  for you against death, which means

  I don’t have much of a case for myself either. I guess

  there isn’t much consolation

  in this anti-suicide letter. Sorry.

  I was probably hoping, most of all,

  this was an anti-suicide note to myself.

  Sam, right now, you’re the easiest person

  to be around because I feel we both already died

  and are the only ones who recognize each other—

  neither living nor dead, not quite ghosts but

  spectral at least. Our conversations feel

  oddly safe, a reprieve from this world.

  And yet, I’m sorry to betray our abstract pact

  on the one truly serious philosophical problem

  but the more we philosophize about suicide,

  the more I prefer you wouldn’t. But that’s

  not an argument for you, or I, to live. I just felt

  like mentioning it.

  Palinopsia Song or Ode to Some Fucking Bird

  I confess there’s something lovely about you, red smear

  outside the window pecking the fallen grain.

  A cardinal or warbler, perhaps. I don’t

  give a shit what kind of bird you are.

  I haven’t done my research into the red birds

  of Southern Ontario. Before the accident

  I would have admonished my students

  for writing about anything

  without doing their homework. I can’t

  explain how entirely irrelevant

  your name is to me. How to make an image

  for the pain of not caring? It’s like the pain

  of not caring. I would have told them

  if you can’t explain, you’re not trying

  hard enough because writing is finding words

  for those who claim words fail.

  I’m not trying hard enough. It doesn’t matter

  if I was right then. I only know

  writing is like my medication.

  It might be stopping me from dying

  which is not the same thing

  as keeping me alive. I can’t

  explain it better than that—

  or, I refuse. There’s a language game

  we could play over whether

  a perception of a flapping red thing

  is still a bird. If I cannot see you

  properly, whatever you’re named,

  do you still function as a vision?

  Keats’s nightingale flares

  and smears, a neurological malady

  that dies with him. I watch you, mortal smudge,

  with the contrast of your deep red feathers

  against the green tint of a browning roof

  to admire or despise. To go on (or not go on),

  to record your beauty, ugly. I celebrate you,

  small red beat, out of protest.

  Ode to Prednisone

  Herr Pill! You murder sleep.

  Eugenicist Cortisol, remake me—

  ox-strong, moon-faced, onioned-skin.

  Hugs are dangerous.

  Performance-enhancing drug for poets—

  you triple feelings. Elegies for the late train & spilled milk.

  Anxiety is Everything.

  Threatened by the light that brightens the dark.

  Dread tolerates Ativan.

  Faustian Chemical, you resurrect myths

  like Lazarus. He was never the same.

  Charon-ian Steroid,

  I’ve been to that shore the dead clamour for.

  Crohn’s Song

  We give our insides to the surgeon’s son.

  Serrated forceps for hands, he roams

  the woods in the park, waiting

  for our leaky parts, shotgun-holed guts,

  like hillbillies used ’em for targets. He scrapes

  together his silver shears like coat hangers rattling

  from a closet door’s gust. Lamplight asterisks

  his clippers. The night twists

  & unwinds the swing-set chains. He whistles

  like a distant train. Ileums

  like chewed & strung bubble gum.

  Our guts digest meaninglessness,

  functioning less as waste disposals—

  rather murderers. Bathrooms

  are scenes for CSI teams.

  Swaddled in butcher’s wrap,

  our moist insides are free

  from hungry clamps.

  The surgeon just takes and leaves to waste,

  but we whose guts curse blood,

  love the surgeon’s son. He gives

  our innards value again, asking

  only what the market will bear,

  burnt chutes put to good use:

  whirly tubes shrieking

  above boys’ heads. We’re knotted

  in the shape of a giraffe.

  We make children laugh.

  We seal the insides of washing machines

  & are plucked in The Rite of Spring.

  A lady washes her scrub-green yard

  with uncoiled colons, enthralled

  lawn care season has begun.

  She sprays us as she waves. We laugh

  to show no harm was done.

  We laugh till our insides hurt none.

  Symptoms Include a Compulsive Desire to be Understood

  Go, dear friends, and climb inside

  a drawing of a field, labelled cortex.

  See inside the pink grove

  a receptor like a daffodil

  named 5-HT2a. Now scribble over it

  with black thick ink, like a child trying

  to erase a mistake. It’s hard

  to illustrate a loss. Inability to process

  visual information, an excess of sight.

  I responded to treatment incorrectly.

  Recall a childhood-TV-memory:

  a cartoon octopus-croupier,

  deals eight hands at once.

  Statistically unbeatable.

  It’s this simple, a giant squid

  attacked me. I thought I had entered

  a vast dark sea, until

  I was close enough

  to see the eye. I’m prescribed

  anticonvulsants, off-label.

  I’m prescribed time. I want

  to explain to you, my friends,

  a condition unfound

  on the medical atlas. My vision is like

  paint brushes stuck together

  or a camera shutter slow to close

  or a representation of someone like

  myself, impure simulacrum

  describing how he can’t describe

  your shadow at evening

  trying to see him.

  Poem for a Broken Bone

  I fell off my bike like a child

  near forty. A stranger

  who looked similar to my father

  stopped to lift my body

  from the paved earth

  and asked, Is anything broken?

  Later the X-rays revealed

  a fractured elbow. No, I told him,

  I’m only hurt. I’d never broken

  a bone before. I had always imagined it,

  a bit, like falling in love: a feeling

  quick and everything at once. Rather,

  a radial head fracture is more like falling

  out: an elusive pain which, upon reflection,

  needed immediate attention. As the stranger

  who, truth be told, looked nothin
g

  like my father, was leaving, I saw myself

  grow small in his mirror’s rear-view.

  I wanted to tell him, Actually it’s pretty bad—

  the pain, I mean. I wanted to ask, can you stay

  an indeterminate while?

  But at thirty-eight it’s too late

  to be adopted. Instead, I sat on a kempt lawn

  among garden gnomes. I was far

  from home. The siblings I’ve never had

  surely would have said, Get back on the horse,

  you sissy. And so as though I had gone

  over the mane of a wild beast

  I had failed to tame, I rose,

  took hold of the handlebars,

  and rode on. My arm throbbed.

  A voice back there said, Maybe you’re hurt,

  bad. And another said, It’s just pain,

  you can still ride. I rode

  to the local CVS and began my plans

  for playing nurse. Isopropyl, ice pack,

  cotton balls, bandages, gauze. I saw the clerk

  see my supplies. Maybe he thought

  I was a man who knew how to look

  after himself or the supplies were for another,

  wounded and whom I loved. How silly

  it seems, as my arms burned, I believed

  a few dabs of alcohol was all I needed

  to heal. I thought of the recent breakup,

  how it maybe meant I’d never be a father,

  an absence I thought I wanted—

  for this body to be all

  that was in my care. In the Wendy’s restroom

  I looked at my bruised elbow,

  skin masking the fracture

  and began to clean

  as my mother had taught me,

  when, you’ll gather, she was

  still alive. I told myself

  as she had done, It’s going to sting

  but only a moment. I lifted

  my elbow higher, and the pain

  pulled a loud scream from me.

  My mother had been mistaken.

  The sting was going to last

  for quite some time.

  Election Night in the Ward

  What use is my sense of humor?

  — Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue”

  The bipolar boys look forward to their twenty-minute passes

  to buy Tim Hortons hockey cards. A dollar

  with any medium-sized beverage.

  They swap glossy pictures of health