Unwitting Evangelists

Some folks live in negative territory every day, 

live on the wrongside of the demographic altogether. 

Errors of brain wiring force them into a granularity 

of vision that would terrify the likes of us. 

They struggle, with unyielding integrity, 

to leverage what right functioning they have 

and build some kind of strategic staircase to normality. 

Aberrant fears drill down into vulnerable minds 

feeding back godawful beliefs they can't quite shake, 

shame cascading over it all as if crazy 

wasn't enough to cope with. It's like some sinister 

reduction in force of brain's powers.

In this space, getting ducks in a row 

becomes an effort in grounding. They try to capture 

their colleagues, stakeholders who must come 

to the party, like Alice to the mad hatter, in another 

effort to keep their doors open, to make
their thinking 360 degrees once again. At the close of play,
though, the paradigm rarely shifts, hallucinations,
like low hanging fruit, pre-prepare them 

for the idea showers that never end. Brain storms abound.
They yearn to be platform atheists to their version 

of holistic cradle-to-grave disorder. Instead, 

they're product evangelists even as it loops back on them

and drives others away. Challenges- 

how to conversate, how to sprinkle magic 

over bizarre behaviors, how to touch base offline, 

overwhelm them while answers steer clear. 

Going forward means being lost in a maze on no one's radar

at the end of the day, actioning damaged from the get-go.

Tony Maude has us writing biz-speak, jargon and buzzwords over at the pub. After 36 years working with the seriously and persistently mentally ill, these phrases, silly in a business setting, became a way to better speak the mentally ill's remarkably difficult story. They have my respect.

Contact

She shuffles by lost
in the fog of mental illness,
mute, unreachable.
I make nursing rounds,
hum some old tune. She
turns, follows me, hums
the same song.
Across her chasm
of neural chaos,
contact.


The prompt from Fireblossom over at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads was to write about calamities and from my 36 years as a psychiatric nurse, there is no calamity that touches my heart more than major mental illness. This is a true story of a client with schizophrenia in a state hospital in California who had been mute for years. I was humming a song my father used to sing and she hummed along. So I started singing the songs I remembered from him and she sang along. She had a beautiful voice. Eventually we learned she was a singer with Benny Goodman in the mid 30's. She loved to sing. I offer it on dVerse poets open link night as well.