My mind dances and swirls the jive and the jitterbug skirting around a myriad of colourful thoughts and shapes and places that may or may not exist.
It lurches as if somewhere my rebel self has pulled the emergency break and comes to a screeching halt leaving me vacant and vague beyond the reach of this world.
My mind has within it realms filled with volcanoes, raging waters and cliff edges lined with gorse bushes and burns me, scalds me, swallows me up periodically or else some dark shadow of who I am pushes me over the edge and I fall into a kind of abyss.
My mind is alive and buzzing and builds ladders from words once spoken by kind mouths. My mind can call my name and ****** me back to life and whisper hope into my heart as it builds a ladder from nothingness and leads me from death.
My mind is beyond comprehension and yet simultaneously can be almost transparent and articulates itself to me with passion and such clarity.
My mind is more magical than Houdini, darker than living inside a top hat, more robust than the largest of diamonds, weaker than egg shell, contains more colours than a rainbow, its intricate, it has the ability to distort like fun house mirrors, it devours knowledge like chocolate cake, it can be sloth-like or ant-like in its focus and diligence in extremes, it’s Narnia and Wonderland and fallen fairy tales blended, poisoned and polished.
As a baby, my mind – sponge, soaked everything up and yet refused to be wrung out.
As a five-year-old my mind put Picasso and Carroll and Barrie to shame and built up worlds in which I could live, created threads and wove them into reality and forced prisms into my eyes so when the sun shone I saw everything in magnificent vibrant glorious spectrums of colour.
As a ten-year-old my mind built a court house - old style - judge, jury and executioner. It planted olive groves and slipped olive branches out through my mouth - they tasted like Brussel-sprouts - they made me gag but had to be endured as I passed them and myself between those around me, grasping my ideals that the world could be changed, hanging on for grim death.
As a teenager my mind opened wide, it came to life like a popup book, scenes remembered unfolding as if a gust of wind blew ferociously through it and yet my mind also closed the book, closed itself, locked the doors, bolted the windows and drew black velvet curtains until there was nothing but numb blankness. It made me grow wings, colourful and exotic and taught me to fly and I did fly higher and higher until the air grow too thin and my wings would wilt, feathers shedding as I would plummet, colours fading to greys and blacks and I would be scorched by red hot lava, fight for my life in violent seas and be thrown into the gorse bushes staring over the cliff edge into the abyss. Sometimes my mind pushed me over the edge, other times I balanced like a circus freak and other times I dared myself to fall and did. And then my mind would haunt me, punish me, berate me before gentle breathing into me - bringing me back to life.
And now, at twenty-five I find myself not wanting to run from my mind, not wanting to close it down or sedate it with medication. Instead, I watch it fascinated, horrified, feeling somewhat the ****** with the same morbid urges that makes one slow down and look at a car crash by the road. I am exhausted by it. I am frightened by it. I am intrigued by it. For the first time in my life I am letting my mind play out despite not knowing steps to that waltz I am trying to dance.
Written in 2010 - not really a poem so much as lyrical musings and a making sense of my mental health
