The paranoid poet

Between the poet and the grimacing woman
on a beat-up blue bicycle,
lies a blurred wasteland.

She hasn't always been this person.

Her squalid apartment
the letters scrawled in mad ink
that fizz by themselves in my in-basket

the dreamy smile
that makes her look, suddenly, young.

Walking the tightrope with her
ignoring the drop of the past,
avoiding looking down
to recognize the loss
and spinning, headfirst
into dizzying sadness.

The fear that I, too, might unravel
and spin off into nothing.

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CM is a published poet, a librarian in a past life and a client of mine. She recently admitted that she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and fears that she'll be evicted, now that her landlord knows the truth about her. She insists that her mental illness doesn't affect her ability to write poetry.


I worry about her a lot, visit her often and get almost weekly letters from her. Once or twice a year, she'll send me a poem. I treasure those.


The man with the "golden voice" has me thinking of such things... I imagine a government social worker, somewhere, cheering him on, knowing this was coming, all along.

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Photo from the Howard Finster collection at the High Museum in Atlanta. I was there recently to see the Dalí exhibit and... wow!