Abagail George
In The Age Of Complex PTSD
or Time Management With Peta Lin
At The Psychiatric Hospital
Time wasted by distractions gives you an unplanned
day. The clouds look uniform enough from where I am standing.
You lose time worrying about the things you have to
do. Like for instance, concern about fatigue. Being an outsider,
and interruptions by activities. Please, remember me. That
I am an open house from the land to the sea. Reform the
party. Do justice to the cake. Find the straw for the fire.
Help me to bring this house down. Burn this house down
with fire. Find the grave. Find the daughter. Salvage the
landfall, the broken country there at the zero point of no
return. Menopause is just a beginning. A place to stand. (Quiet!).
I am the embryo. I am the womb. I am David Wagoner.
The daughter with a zoo house for a brain. Philosopher and
theologian. I come from a broken home. Opera could be
found there nesting beautifully amongst the underworld of the
velocity of psychiatric disorder. Nobody comes to that place
to visit there. It is a lonely and terrifying place at nightfall.
Witches shine torches in your face to check if you’re asleep.
You’re as authentic as a string of fake pearls. Mother has
no love for me, sister is distracted by her teaching English and
her German boyfriend. Everybody thinks I am dead inside.
So, I must be dead inside. Down below me is the ceiling.
Up above me is the hanging ground, the wings of marital
vertigo. Find the image of Christ, and you will find the portrait
of a South African novelist there. I am a graveyard poet.
Dead to the world of reality. Only accepted by the kingdom
of non-reality, the strings of the depressive age. You have
knowledge or understanding about this situation. You
don’t have to live a hurting, wounded half-life day-in and
day out with radiance and illumination scarring your entire
physical body. Variations of it. And every narrative I have
ever written carries with it a haunting ellipsis of a scarring
too. Veiled like a shroud. The appraisal will always be in
context to everything else about my life. My identity, the
fragility of my ego, the frightening sense of being displaced
from the only home I have ever known. This childhood
house. I think of my self-concept. Its non-development over
these years. I eat those Christian mustard seeds like there’s
no tomorrow for me with my “fake” personality disorder.
I spent twenty years of my life writing ten books. And I
can’t stand to think of twenty wasted years. I can’t stand
to think of losing it all. I can’t stand to think of the pain, and
the emptiness and the social exclusion. Navigating the waters’
landscape of the intellect and psyche of the poet’s poet.