mental health

Stairway to Seven (Nightfall)

the night used to be my closest
friend,

but lately its been bending the corners 
of my optimism.

dichotomy of sanity
and deeper wisdom;

and the latter is scathing membranes,
burning ladders to the ground.

my stairway to heaven,
conjured from lofty
unleavened bread
and psuedo-intellectual dread,

has a locked door as its final
creaking step,

and the demons are so fast,
and picking locks
was never my strength.

Willie Watt
3.26.15

Brain Tease

My head’s kind of twisting,
like off-kilter camera angles
and arguments where no one’s listening.

I’m happier grounded;
concrete in synapses trying to escape
their boundaries.

And ya, I’ve payed like hell, fought like hell, sought loopholes
and half-truths to keep the final bell
from ringing,

but if I don’t feed the beast from time to time
then it’ll all come back at once
and finally there’ll
be no receipt for my fragile mind.

So sapphire treble-clefs
and circumvented minefields
come dime-a-dozen,

and I rummage through the parts
I can handle,

smoke the rest
and exhale into rooms
grown from chloroplast 
and effulgent candles.

I can’t man-handle
my disposition,

but I can sure as fuck
distance myself from crystal prisons,
treacherous schisms
and apocalyptic visions.

The wisdom of winsome kingdoms
clings to my survival
in a symbiotic
(admittedly neurotic) way.

and today
has got to, got to, got to,
be the daring plankton
that got away.

Willie Watt
3.24.15 

Dear Sanity,

I will make you real
I will make you concrete
I will make you complete.

I will watch as your facets bereaved
of meaning and space and heat
replete with an unworthy madness
is branded batshit crazy
and exchanged for a revelry 
of a more familiar type.

Yes,
yes I will do what is truthful and right, in the end.

I will make you real again.

Willie Watt
11/4/14