NEURO-TRANSMITTERS, THEY THINK

Electric brain synapses neuro-transmitters

Opted me out of ordinary life, consensual truth, opts me out

Sleeping through the whole week-end

Paralysis of will, the psychiatrists call it

Soporific medicines sleepy pills slow my mind

Can’t remember the first Chen Tai-Chi form after five years

My disability doesn’t count

When employers, publishers, governments seek demographic statistics:

Gender, race, orientation, not my disability

But I’m opted out of social norms, structures

By motivation, mood, mentation, medication

CONFESSION:

Try though I do, my career interruptus

Staggering through the world as best I can

As best I have to because despite my disability

No one takes care of you

COMING TO TERMS

It’s dawning on me that I will not be able

To reclaim 27 years lost,

The development I could have experienced,

When pills and depression

Robbed me

Of a competence I once had,

Which could have flourished into greater form

No, I can’t reclaim those years

Nor the increased competence I would have gained in those 27 years

I must accept the limitations on

My ability

Sad, or philosophical

I cannot reclaim those years

I may never recover even what I once was

Let alone what I could have become

With 27 years of practice, application, learning

Tragic, the waste, those lost 27 years

Coming to terms with what I am, where I am

The competences I do have, not

Those I don’t have, I could have had

WHERE I COULD HAVE BEEN

Recovering from a 26-year sleep

Pills, soporific pills to

Keep me out of the psych-ward

Relearning old accomplishments

Looking at my colleagues

Where they are now

Where I could have been

But for . . .

Where I could have been

Asleep

The hospital I never want

To see again

Why I was there

But for . . .

Pills, soporific pills