It ain't the medication that's killing me.  It's more this archaic dependency on rational thought that is so dutifully  required  in order to communicate,  shape, amuse, decay.   I have the diagnosis and it isn't particularly  expensive to imagine the shifts that transpire when I feel as if she has a finely chisled dagger pointed at my throat.   I want to succumb sometimes;  I want to be eviscerated and abandoned, left to  grovel at her exquisite heel, championing her virtues,  waiting for the glistening totality of her cruelty.  I take the pills and they become part of my essence.  Without them I will be rash, undecided, unruly and far too base to make inroads into the slobbering niceties that define social discourse.  I will be a phantom aroused internally by stimulation that can never be properly defined let alone analyzed into oblivion.  I have been programmed to feel in a specific, ordered manner and am allowed my delusions provided they do not transgress the immediacy of interpersonal contact.  The urge to detonate, to hurl my body at the stars and be tricked by their haughty charade--is experienced as the truth when I've broken down Mania's door holding an implement of death, determined to entertain my Self unconditionally on his suffering.  Paralysis plagues me as well as the staunch belief that my life is a vice that must be torn root and branch from this soil that has betrayed me.

Without memory I merely shuffle along, imagining my Self to be dangerous and part of an underground collective of those who still shudder when they contemplate the toxicity of much that passes for life.  I'm not moved by torture, calamities, villanry, deception, distress.  I do not feel great pangs of righteous anger when confronted with actual suffering ticking away thousands of miles from my doorstep.  I have a body  that craves enticements;  I want to encounter the word made flesh, the wellspring of too many tears, and the agony of watching each moment fade with a discreet nonchalance into nothingness.  I cannot hide.  I cannot merely say that I no longer accept as valid those official sounding voices who have so energetically labeled me as something to be legitimately feared and subsequently tried, picked apart, stripped bare of every difficult nuance.  Yet, I am not  completely bereft in my acquiescence to this principled ideal that must categorize, contain, demonize.  I know what I have been but I do not necessarily recognize my Self in those frantic gestures, that visciousness, that unfettered hatred for any thing that dares to place its carcass in my path.  At the center of all manic episodes is an almost cosmic frustration that materializes when we are unable to obtain that most precious thing precisely when it is calling to us.  Through the fragments of our thoughts we fail to accept any burden because we see it as coming from outside when we are forced to take refuge in the safest, most fully integrated bunker we can find.  It isn't the fear of flying apart that haunts us;  it is merely the fear of having to reveal to others our majestic longing to become something more or less than human.

The flesh would penetrate and be penetrated with alacrity and great skill should circumstances arise that might demand it.  Sex is not a sentimental journey;  it is a sword with which the body can finally carve out its most daemonic and forensic needs upon those others who remain shivering in the dark.  Yet there is always a destination that eludes us in the end.  There is a hope that we will finally actualize our suffering in such a way that it transforms us into something stark, vital, and wholly determined.  Pain is the voice of the institutionalized, the reckless sorts who fall down the rabbit hole and lack the tenacity to hoist themselves up.  These are legitimate victims in the war to eradicate all that cannot  be processed, confirmed, structured within deliberate boundaries that are required for normative society to function and flourish.  We exist on the margins and this simple fact cannot be sugarcoated into passive complaints regarding the unfairness of being so properly afflicted.  It is comfortable to be locked in this room we have designed in accordance to our most specific specificatons.  It is safe to be so duly ensconced in the vibrant urgencies of our collective shame.  Yet, the children playing outside cause us to pause in wonderment.  We see them amusing themselves at each other's expense.  We imagine our Selves so unencumbered by guilt, failure and death.  It is under these circumstances that we suffer under the delusion that we can at last be made whole, championed, rescued from the messianic purity of our madness.