Category: Mental Health
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Mike Hotel – a poem for World Mental Health Day and Black History Month
I was diagnosed with Clinical Depression when I was 11 years old. I was then diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder aged 35 years, but really I had been living with it for many, many years. Looking back, all the signs were all there, but my friends and family just put them down to moodiness, quirkiness,…
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Battery Pack
As I sit on the top floor of my work building, back nestled against the safety door that leads to the roof, I try to ignore the pulse in my forehead, the result of a morning of pretending. Pretending is hard. It’s like turning one of those new-fangled cordless vacuum cleaners up to maximum and…
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Knots
Anxiety. It’s never a mere stomach knot. It’s like a coarse frayed entanglement of rope that’s devoured as it sinks into a molten metal mire deep deep deep inside, Fires fly and gases rise, Beastly belching bubbles that swell and explode like fireworks of fury, All the while an angry tremor bellows through the scalloped…
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Disconnected
What’s this that falls before my eyes, With blistered sores and weary sighs? A shell, a corpse that’s mummified in the bloodied gauze of her demise, She is my spirit, Mauled, maligned, Her salted tears have scored and dried. Malevolence poured from callous minds, Like tiny swords that beat and bind ’til they’ve pilfered thoughts…
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Dysmorphic
It’s a dark, dark road that you venture down when you can’t even look yourself in the eye, When the words ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ explode like landmines in your mind every time you look in the mirror, When you’d rather rip your flesh and gouge out your eyes than have to look a second more…