Faking Bad

Seven years ago around this time of year I was riding around town all day on my disabled bus pass, writing children's poems for a book I was planning. In the city I live in the mental health center is, or was at that time, right across from the bus station, and I saw people walking in and out all day and wondered if they were getting help. I had been diagnosed with Schizoid Personality Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder at sixteen, but somehow through a combination of self-medication and just good old ignoring the problem had managed to make it through almost forty years of life without intervention. But I wasn't making it any more. I had injured my back rather badly lifting a keg of beer and could barely bend at the waist, meaning I wasn't going to be able to do menial labor where I could be left alone while I moved something heavy from one place to another with no one bothering me. Every day I got closer and closer to walking into that building and asking for help, but it just wasn't something anyone in my family had ever done. The shame and stigma were tremendous. So, I rode the bus around and around an entire summer until August. Then, one day I went in and told them I was homeless and I didn't know what to do. This poem is a somewhat fictionalized account of that process seven years ago.

Faking Bad 

In anticipation of my 

Evaluation to be declared 

Non Compos Mentos 

I slept under a bridge 

For three days 

"Getting into character," 

But on the morning of 

My intake interview 

My hair fell perfectly, 

I mean I looked like 

A fucking rock star. 

College girls on the bus 

Were giving me their 

Numbers and my skin, 

Which I'd purposely sunburnt 

And caked in the finest filth, 

Glowed like an Australian 

Chippendale dancer named Weegie 

And even the female Assisstant D.A. 

Who had busted me for vagrancy 

Waved her panties from 

The third story building 

Of the Courthouse. 

No matter how much I 

Tried to speak gibberish 

Poetry and philosophical 

Tracts spewed from my mouth. 

Shuffling past the park 

I beat eight 

Grand Masters 

At chess on move 1 

Inadvertently I solved 

The Phi Epsilom Theorem 

By kicking stones 

Into an algorythym. 

When I arrived they didn't 

Make me wait at all. 

My caseworker giggled like 

A schoolgirl while I told her 

Each day was like an endless shift 

In a Chinese fish- gutting 

Sweatshop and every one of my fellow 

Employees was motivationalist 

Richard Simmons. 

She ungirdled her enormous 

Tits and as they spilled 

Like fishguts onto the desk 

She began to howl 

"Fuck me, fuck me, oh fuck 

Me right here in 

Front of the open window 

On State Street as everyone 

Watches me fucking the strongest, 

Healthiest, smartest, most popular, 

Well-adjusted man in the world. 

The rest of the examination was 

Also a success. 

But as I left the Mental HealthCenter 

feeling marvelous 

I accidentally bumped 

An old woman with the door: 

"Watch out you manic-depressive 

Schizoid with Socially Avoidant 

Features klutz." 

-Thomas L. Vaultonburg

I got help. Help that was always available but for some reason was incredibly hard to ask for. Part of me still wanted to maintain what I thought was my freedom and independence and ride around in that bus all day with no where to go and not much hope for the future. An entire lifetime of society's and my own stigmas against mental illness were drilled into my head. Nutjob. Weirdo. Psycho. All the words we use to refer to the mentally ill went around and around in my head. They had as much power as hunger and homelessness. And that's way too much power to give a stigma.

After open heart surgery two years ago it started to become more and more apparent to me I want to use the thing I care about most, poetry, for something other than just writing about my own thoughts. I'd like to have a forum so other people with mental illness and other disabilities can express themselves and their struggles, or just write about whatever they wanted. That's what I want to do here at Outsider Poetry.