I was 'tabbing' which is almost like 'going on a bender' or 'pulling an all-nighter.' The kind of history list that makes you wonder if there isn't everything wrong and right with me all at once. I was interested in theories of depression and self-conception ,albeit only in so far as I was curious about why two children of an eye doctor ended up being eye doctors also, while searching for a place to cash in the insurance for spectacles. I wondered about theories of developmental psychology,and 'ended up', sans google fu, in my own inbox sending a selection of poetry off to an online journal in a flury of leaping over the constant hurdle of such magnetic downward spirals.
Here are two of those poems: I ate several oreos and made a source of life smoothie. I'm hungry. I am wondering why I haven't felt little Celeste moving inside me today. What is she doing in there?
John L. Peterson
The childrens' book author died
his Littles were never for us
What words of a blue book
my grandfather's old fingers last pointed out
were some military shame
and his frail figure trying to explain
their dinner bell on the telephone table
silently
could not suffice to say
why there was no love
coming through the line
3902 Old York
my mother's cylindrical teat nursing a baby
in the ancient red leather rocker
the smell of the house that burned in ninety-eighty-five
and her heart with it,
Lost forever all those chaotic schizoid episodes
her saying don't eat daddy's little blue stelazine pills,
even at 6 I can remember her saying they'd kill
~Love,
Emily
