Till Death Comes Knocking On Our Doors
Here, even amongst our own
Anything you say of depression
Can be dismissed as Eurocentrism
In the language of all things stereotype
There are mouths fixing themselves stiff
They say
Hey black girl with skin dripping melanin
Where did you get that sad?
Pouring like tar on everything
A sticky mess
What sickness has made your mind home?
Get up and do something
Do you not have food on your table?
A roof over your head?
Air in your lungs?
All that greed is what’s driving you crazy
And craziness is for white people
With all their unnecessary stuff
You’re so unnecessary
So privileged aren’t you?
You have the white man’s illness?
Can you even spell Schizophrenia?
Who are all the people on your face?
You are making the gods angry
You are making us angry
Sing a happy song
Aren’t you grateful?
They will ask you to gyrate
To the music of being here
Like you are so happy to be here
When black bodies battle mental illness
Those that cannot see them
Dismiss them as attention seekers
Till death comes knocking on our doors
Defiant Seed
Before we were older and wiser
Our parents hid our siblings behind houses
With shackles both of mind and body
For the way their minds differed from the rest
Their whole lives draped in a garment of myth
They said
Witchcraft; it has to be witchcraft
How else do you explain
A grown man unable to navigate
his existence?
I say, brave hands
Re-collecting constantly shattering glass
Shards like diamonds
Sticking out from his hands
The glass is his mind
Something broke in there
Someone is trying to survive in there
Someone is alive in there
They said
She is a just a bore
Never wants to leave the house
Let alone the bed
They said snob, I say beauty
Have you any idea how great a
company you have to be
To want to spend all the time
by yourself?
I heard of a woman who can split into
Seven different personalities a day
Each of whom knows of the other like family
A friend, a parent, an infant
And this is one of the ways the mind
responds to trauma
A wound that wouldn’t heal
So the mind splits into different
people to share the pain
Trauma
An unwelcome guest with no etiquette
So the house that is the mind
Splits into many different rooms
To share the discomfort
I had a friend
Who could paint meticulously
Could create serenading music for days
Before other days came
When even the floor by her bedside
Forgot the crease of her underfoot
At the hospital they cleaned out the wound
Soaked it up in meds and called it bipolar
It takes twelve years for an OCD patient
to get proper help
And even that help costs an arm and a leg
That there are no misconceptions to house that won’t cost us
No lame myths to spread that won’t end us
These are real people with beautiful minds
With an existence so defiant
Like seed rejected by the soil
That grows to be a forest
Like stars in pitch black darkness
Refusing to believe that heresy