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.
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
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