Emergency Appointments With Psychiatrists Poem by Michael Spinelli

I slept with the lights on,
Blaring,
For fear of what
I could do with darkness.

I wanted to stand
Naked to the cold
On my fire escape
And scream until my lungs collapsed
Filled with gall and fire
And silence.

I wanted to kill myself,
Not to die,
But to kill.
To stalk,
to hunt,
perchance to win.

She's always been
A cartoon
Brunhilde, the psychiatrist,
Thick accent, Eastern Europe.
.5 mg Klonopin,
as needed for anxiety
I lost stability between
Lucky charms and Fellatio
5 mg Propranolol,
for performance anxiety, not to be mixed with clonopin
Asking me too many whats,
too many whos,
too many wheres,
too many whys,
too many hows, hows, hows, hows…
100 mg Bupropion,
for depression, every morning with food.

Emergency appointments
With psychiatrists
Do no good
When it's been
Four hours
Since you stopped crying
And, now,
You feel nothing.

It should be easy to talk to a cartoon