They were years of mental illness,
but no schizophrenia or manic depression.
Split personality ... maybe.
A time when an otherwise intelligent person
gave into his own delusions;
chasing false gods, searching for wisdom from basement IQs.
Wanting desperately to escape the onslaught of adulthood,
and offering that poison to close friends,
so that they / I wouldn't have to face the monster alone.

Reality is such a fragile thing when tampered with,
twisted into peculiar shapes by synthetic divergences
from misinterpreted parental love,
caught up in the passion of teenage rebellion,
childhood spankings, a convenient excuse to tear down the monoliths,
believing without doubt I was right,
they in error for simply doing what had to be done.

Shyness had been defeated in a newfound chug-a-lug;
introversion crushed by unqualified pharmacists
dispensing under the table,
and if that's where I ended up on a Saturday night, then so be it.
A small price to stay tight with friends in similar degrees of madness,
though would mysteriously disappear after the baggy had been emptied.

There was no way I'd let that monster back out of the cellar,
but mental illness, even in its mildest form
can only be kept under boot for so long.
And much to my horror, it was upstaged by a stomach turning
roller coaster whose tracks didn't have any visible direction.
All things I had taken for granted as right,
stripped naked by the strange looks on faces
who once knew me as a quiet, well behaved lad.

I got smart though, and forged a leash out of intermittent abstinence,
despite a steady stream of broken laws, lost jobs,
relationships gone sour ...

BUT WAIT

Why am I telling you this? That time is behind me now.
Afterall, I did finally bottom out. Spent six weeks in the local mental hospital,
putting to rest the monsters, both childhood and synthesized.
Passed the thirty year mark a few years back.
My folks and I get along great, years of bitterness put behind us.
They, proud parents of aspiring writer; I myself with a little one.
It's hard to believe any of it happened,
easy to convince myself none of it did.

Now, I spend a lot of time in front of the TV,
coffee and cigarettes having replaced other constant companions.
I play headgames with myself sometimes about going back into the fray;
the wail of a siren not far off convincing me otherwise.
A commercial comes on the tube
where a man cracks an egg into a frying pan and says,
“This is your brain on drugs.”
My seven year old son then turns to me and asks,
“And what did you do in that war, daddy?”

© 1990

780 hits as of November 2023

05/23/2016

Author's Note: One of the closing pieces in Along The Vertical Horizon, following, At Overbrook Fair, preceding, Mind Over Mind, then the closing piece, Armistice.

Posted on 05/23/2016
Copyright © 2024 Chris Sorrenti