Maladaptive

If people really knew how weird I am
they’d explode before their brain
was done screaming “Wha...?”

I can’t tell if it’s poetry or confession
Just so you know I don’t know if reading this
makes you an after the fact accomplice
I wouldn’t blame you for running
or bracing yourself like my weird is concussive

Wherever it comes from, it keeps coming
You lean in, deciding to stay for now, you guess
Feeling scandalous
Coming up with a contingency plan if I’m
a gross kind of crazy
Not knowing to ask yourself if you’re ready
to change your mind about who’s ever been sane

Weird how I’m never sure what will emanate next from me
at any random time, from who knows what parts, really
Weird how anxiety has opinions about the lethality of everything
More paranoia every day, all fucking day
Weird how I rhyme by accident and it turns out ok

Who only ever drives smooth roads, not us
Who waves off whiplash and trundles on toward
a finish I never promised anyone
Weird fuckers do, and we like it
Fucking weirdo lunatics

Are you waiting up for more of it
Twitchy now, impatient, a little bit
Thinking "Not to trip but is he not proving
any claims he just spit?"
Say it’s weird, folks wanna know how weird it gets
They want it tied in knots so intricate
they’re a fuck you to physics

By the way, I’m diagnosing this “poem” now
Poems are where are all the mental cases
build our own funny farms, conveniently,
out of elements solid as we imagine them to be
Done redlining our attention spans for
whatever is sensible, wearing plaid, 
endlessly blank, too bored to blink 
Dead eyed, warping code to move me 
from now on, awkwardly, like all of me’s
sleeping except one leg that’s awake

creating cause for complaint snatched up by
socialites on a terrace I’m ruining the ambiance of, brunching,
Flinching away like it’s fire when anyone tries to touch me

Is it time to be sorry now again for being wrongheaded
Sorry sorry to anyone I offended
Really so very sorry I know now to say I am
to whoever’s after me for reasons I try to grasp but can’t hold
Sorry sorry sorry I repeat til they go

Now the specimen is walking off down a corridor no one else sees again
Forgetting every single thing he just said
Everything he still owes apologies for, and is still doing
Said sorry without being sorry at all yesterday
He’s sorry for that but why no one says it to him gets confusing

Didn’t do a damn thing, he doesn’t think, to hurt anyone lately
Not a damn thing anyone’s got any business in
He closes his eyes as he curls up in a ball so no one can see where he went

People who hardly listen to him get performatively moody
Told to make sense any time now and refusing
Making sense is against the whole point, I explained plainly
Wait, am I he now, is this still just one personality?

I don’t think either of us are saying anything so crazy it’s earth shifting
Just building walls of rock solid unreason out of chatter ceaselessly
to employ when cornered as offensive weaponry
I imagine them wiping out the whole way of life
most can’t afford surviving
Smashing and smashing endstage capitalism’s smithereens

A violent wish, I know, so maybe I
really am a little sorry
but sacking up sorries shouldn’t be a responsibility
assigned to the inmates
Patients, I definitely said patients,
No nurse from collective subconscious is needed
to lurch into being and comfort me

Look, I’m taking my medicine
Not even wondering why with medicine it’s always
“Yay, drugs again, don’t let the side effects be worrying”
But anything you take and enjoy equals “Drugs bad! I’m warning 
you, drugs, better stay away from me!”

A less maladaptive patient might
consider compliance
Listen when they’re told they’re feeling unwell and
let themselves be helped
Undergo treatment to teach them to work any job that’ll take them
for the profits of whatever corporation they work for
and learn to love not having much choice in the matter
and not think they have any higher calling anymore

When I forget my lessons I go on involuntary vacation
where I won’t frustrate my sense making neighbors
Always barbecuing while voting Republican
at the All-American baseball game
Stimulating the economy on credit
Mid in every way
A motif they keep
Always heterosexually

A more considerate dungeon dweller
Dungeon patient, rather,
Might have made the effort to keep track
of each neighbor’s sensitivities
No matter how often they move
Turns out a lot of them are
still really mad at me

Today I learned them winning damages
doesn’t mean I should pay them with my fists
It does kinda sound that way, doesn’t it
But I unball my fingers and I don’t
and my unwashed laundry pile says
“Brother, that’s growth”

It reminds me of something someone else said
Partially, distantly, something like
“You should be loved for your lunacy”
It makes me cry and for a moment
I remember all the things doctors said
with which I disagree
I don’t believe being emotional will
collapse me irrevocably
Not everything about me is another
sign of instability 

I’ve always been weird and I’m getting weirder yet
but what doesn’t make sense is how
people live til they’re dead
and waste time where they don’t wanna be
doing nothing that really means much to them
because they think they don’t deserve food unless they do 
whatever their boss who barely pays them anyway says
and it’s harder and harder to find anyone
harboring delusions of ever getting ahead

Everyone acts like this set up is
how it has to be, like pretty bad
is as good as most of us get
Which is weird for sure, but also
the gross kind of crazy
The kind of weird to which I take offense
So I better declare this the end
because I’m not supposed to make sense