under the control

[Alan Sondheim]

under the control

tried to get off welbutrin which i took on my own, lexapro as well, the
other twisted molecule from celexa, the last taken after the debacle in
miami. so i stopped the first and went through a couple of sleepless
nights and shakiness., the days were filled with exhaustion, i couldn't
move, my work was an afterthought which kept pouring itself out in spite
of my mind's uneasy clawings. after that i gave up on the lexapro as well,
cold turkey, and then the shakes began, something that shouldn't have
happened after this drug, which has me in its unholy grasp. i found anger
welling up, rising to the surface, my existence a pure fury against my
situation and all that it entailed. the fury led me to push everyone
around me to the limits, there was no going back, nothing from the path
bringing the wonder of despair home again. i began to get dizzy, and
dizziness took hold of me, i'd stop in the middle of the sidewalk losing
consciousness, holding on to azure as if my life depended on it, which it
did. i couldn't work or worked rather in a trance and the production, more
distant than ever, continued as i found myself more and more sexually
aroused, stripping everything bare between us, my consciousness the first
to go. i was shattered, i'd go to sleep around ten, only to wake for hours
in the middle of the night, as now, when my hormonal rhythms are still
screaming and stressed out muscles tense to the breaking point. i was
never awake and never asleep, i could barely keep myself upright with
these spells or swoons as i began to think of them, a latter-day
neurasthenia haunting me as the world swayed and rippled. azure was going
through other trials and tribulations, i found i couldn't help her, both
of us swimming to the bottom of the airless grotto, gasping for breath,
screamed drowned in the screams of others. down there i meandered, my fury
reaching new heights, terrifying me, an enormous depression past despair
waiting at the suicidal door. for once it wasn't easy to lie within the
old familiar feelings of the down world, new gates and portals were giving
way exposing raw skin, nerves, unknown tissues for unknown purposes, each
of them blistered in the salt, some dull monster emerging. i gave up,
reached for the pill, the ultimate stage of the addict, after four or five
days of this, living off the chemistry once again. one wasn't enough, a
second that night, the promise and premise of a third, a fourth, the
continuity of a functioning mind not quite my own, the turn towards a
different kind of somnolence, all questions turned problematic with
dulled belief in the possibilities of answers, answers linked in ragged
nets to questions in the salt air above the ocean of truth precisely
because of its lack of limitations. now i'm a re-covering addict, the
addiction to lexapro forming the hunger in my mind, the welbutrin long
lost and unmissed, expose of another chemical landscape. i couldn't manage
both, i recognize the stress and most likely shortened arc of the madness
of my life, i continue exhaling the language of description, the paste
over the substance of the real, the substrate over the substance. a little
while ago i was sleeping, something uncanny woke me, and i'm again here,
the dizziness a slight new turn of events, writing this down before it
gets lost like so many other texts expelled from the surface of my mind. i
tend myself, i tend myself constantly, words flourish in spite of the
onslaught of the casualty of the brain. i'm at the tip of the flame, the
bottom of the chasm, salt burns my wounds, soaks the oils from the skin,
fills the pen, makes thoughts rise. i'd rather fight the mind than the
brain, i'd say i'm back, but for how long before some new addiction makes
itself manifest, something keeping me on track and the track a little
longer.


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