Meditation on Manic-Depressive Illness
But I still have bottles of pretty pills . . . I throw like life rafts to keep them afloat . . .in choppy seas, me passing my doctor-days
Manic-depressive made sense to me.
Manic! I loved it! And I understood
depressive, too: downcast, dull,
dun-colored, dung. Then a committee
changed the name and we mushed
by dog sled to Bipolar-land with its
frozen North and torrid South, antipodes
of our moods. And with global warming,
glaciers melt like our diagnoses,
all the old Borderlines and angry
adolescents melted down to Bipolar
slush. But I still have bottles of pretty pills
I throw like life rafts to keep them afloat
in choppy seas, me passing my doctor-days
dreaming I could be like an Arctic scientist
with a tool to core out samples from
every patient’s heart and measure each time
they froze, the heat when they thawed.
