insomnia’s my closest friend.
Music by Joshua Dent / Words by Tavius Marshall
Premiered by chatterbird on December 5, 2022
ACT 1 - Insanity
ACT 2 - Mania
ACT 3 - Depression
ACT 4 - Help
Act 1 -
“Insanity” (spoken out loud)
I’ve got this manic intrinsic cataclysmic resistance baked into my substance, feasting on the sustenance of my brain’s chemical imbalance that leads to having to find a perfect balance between Manic Maniac and Black, Biracial, Bisexual, Depressed artist.
Here for catharsis, the normal way to start this would be me giving you the definition of insanity but that by definition is insanity, a circular calamity of collapsing mental galaxies and it’s here we find ourselves in the narrative of today's rhyming based personal story.
A story is all I’m here to tell to dwell for a spell in my elaborative well, to tell a tale, expel and expound with sounds from my foray into the profound. Round the edges so you can swallow this limerick based message, regressing and coalescing a narrative dressing. Confessing my subconscious messing into a blessing I have found in finding mental health.
This is just a story.
You will understand it right if you just listen.
How we learn is through stories.
From despair through to glory,
This is just a story.
Right after 1963 the Civil Rights Act tried for the possibility of mental health equality, integrating into a system already built on barbaric fallacies. Mental facilities formed to bring normality at any and all cost to human decency. First frontal lobotomy comes for free if you can’t toe the line of complacency and that’s back when America even pretended to be, trying to care about the mentality of the mentally unhealthy. First let’s understand that the whole system is just a compendium of racist conundrums, and 1840 the American census confirms them, drapetomania dropped in like an addendum. It's the “The desire to be free.” that will send them to a looney bin, is just a racist referendum to a bill that comes due before you lend them.
Insanity used to be the pathological intent to escape from slavery!?!
In 1840 the census was basically a prescription for the maintenance of captivity and the continued denial of black humanity’s rights without a fight.
The storm light exposes the chinks in the armour, while the metal health system saunters from abusive to full neglectful wander. Under the plea for normalcy being black or being free becomes “lunacy” and the machine was never updated, just repurposed not desegregated we just got conflated whiteness with being integrated.
Sedated the creative, quitted the elated, demonized the frustrated, and moved to imprison anyone not white related while never addressing the issue.
Tissue and sinew of the American fabric full stop lacks the ability to face the facts of its reactive fear of Black. Detracting from conversation of any psychological relation to a system THAT IS NOT MADE FOR THEM.
Replacing the sin of physical ostracization with systematic slavery based incarceration.
Skim the top and you can see the list of cops, stopping, frisking and redistricting a whole culture to a capitalistic prison vultures when half the cats just need to sit in a chair and chat about their mothers.
Change is stutter steps, regrets, connecting concepts, fears, tears, looking at the man in the mirror brings sneers from peers who were taught that “a Black man shouldn’t cry”. A lie taught from a colonized mind, unwind the sublime crime of trying to do it on your own. I was taught to be alone, to find a home in myself and reshelf every emotional trauma in a box called “ I don’t wanna”, in a closet named emotional drama. Doored up in a house once named “Drip Your Sleep In A Coffee For 2 Weeks”, get that job or are you weak? 4 days awake, no sleep, I could no longer cry. I can only weep.
I can no longer cry. Only weep.
Act 2 -
“Mania” (spoken out loud)
Alright let's get this elephant out of the room
You need answers to the topics I have brought up.
My dad is Black and my Mom is white.
That means the world doesn’t always see me as Black. Though the world has never entertained for a Got damn second the thought if I was white.
I have Bi-Polar Disorder with *psychotic tendencies.
That means the world can be the most wonderful place, or it can be hell. Sometimes it can be both with some pretty hallucinations and they say it’s all in your head.
That is often the misconception of mental disorders.
Your head isn’t a part of you, it’s all of you.
When Bi-Polar takes over, your body, your mind, your time, your moments, your proponents, enemies, your sympathies, frivolities, savagery, propensities, parts, pursuits, are all low hanging fruit to the feelings that fulfill the fruition of freeing your mind.
I also have ADD which means
That I am bored speaking this way and I am now going to go back to rhyme.
Not all the time. Sometimes.
But not now.
You know.
You know.
You know, now I must readdress my mission, fishin in a lake of discussion through division, dividing through derision, this is a tale spoken over rhymes and prepositions.
You will understand it right if you just listen.
This is just a story.
You will understand it right if you just listen.
How we learn is through stories.
From despair to glory,
This is just a story.
And I’ve only been awake for 5 days at this point.
Find a point through the sound of no sleep.
The creep of the scream of the sound of the back of mind.
Time for sleep would be a tether.
It’s hard to stay sane in this weather
Obedience is better, i once sacrificed another life for the price of my salvation.
Perception was askew, i flew through, giving all of me at any moment, and moments have passed by like stones through a kidney. Slow and sharp.
i played my harp best i can, but i’m a man without any fingers.
So i tried to be a singer, but the smoke lingers in my throat, choking the notes down a few keys.
We always try to freeze time to hold the line back but we lack the ability, so like monkeys we..
Oh wow, me, when i was little we would play games, with things like super dooper airplanes,
but other kids wouldn’t play by the rules, acting like fools, when they would lose.
So i choose to play alone.
i’ll write my own damn chords for this song,
“But then there was her”
And if i was a million tears, i would run down her face all the time, just in hopes that part of me could touch her lips and flow inside, to understand the pain of each word as it worked its way outside.
Outside, inside, i breathe the smoke, i smoke for the separation of pain and pleasure it gives.
It lives in my lungs and helps me die.
i lived once before insomnia, it keeps my creativity awake, as it bakes my brain like flames, ingrains the grains, pbr is the stars in my vision.
Decisions are for the sober.
Over and over, my head in time, and i slept sometime, sometimes, no time. No time is better than now, neverland somehow. I must become that peter pan part. No sleep means art.
My heart drains like sweat from my body. i wipe it off and keep going, my energy into a black hole, voiding my work sapping my force. Blood courses through the veins of the weak and strong but it is long gone from the dead. Their bed is permanently made, rest never to fade. Debts already paid, yet we work for that check. Endlessly checking our day planners for our next opening for our next exit to the ending.
Lending our living, to our day to day life, and it's not giving it back, trapped in serving our services.
“I’m a little busy” he says, and “your pays for way you get” also,
“Never forget to floss”.
But what's the loss when you toss your life?
What's the cost of forgetting to live?
It’s today. The only day. Right now.
He looks at my black shaggy garments and my wooly face with disdain.
He just used up that moment of his life judging me.
My voice trembles at my memories, it moves to the vibrato of a song that can never be sung but reminds me of words like “ seize the day, and not burning pigs.”
It figures that my thoughts never come out in full sentences, like when i say that you should live.
Forgiveness! Another thing left to ignorance we, make real substance out of every grievance, making everyone pay penance for the slightest annoyance.
All i am saying is give peace a chance.
At a glance i realize my teeth need a good flossing, a slow bloody crossing of a string across my gums, it’s pain until numb, and listerine cleans and burns.
She churns in her desire, she savors in her mind.
Scratching her head softly she asks if i’ll start the car, meaning if i say yes i must tread through five degree snow, and i don't want to go. i want to stay forever, but leather chafes so...so..i think i’m gonna go get off this horse. Ofcourse, ofcourse. i must ride on... and on. And on. And on. Through this cold, holding my arms to keep them warm.
i am still yet not the worst.
Did you know that every few seconds someone is getting murdered, raped or beaten?
Re livin this concept when you try to get to bed, head shacked and racked any time I lay it down. This town of thought has nothing to do with me, but lately it feels like my responsibility, and momentarily it’s my bubble to burst.
i thirst to be a loner, looking for an owner, but no one can control, for “i am the captain of this ship”.. And if you listened to Dave you’d understand..
i need answers, answers questions, question, truth, that be, your eyes i can see,
see bits of we, floating past the scenery, to become nothing more than mere memories, like the sun it leaves, under the hills our dreams, ends killed by means,but what this means, is we’re getting lost in me’s, or i’s, or me.
“i hope i find you feeling healthy, it’s so crazy how it feels tonight, right wrong ashes to ashes all fall down.”
If you listened to Dave you’d understand..If you listened to Dave you’d understand..If you listened to Dave you’d understand..If you listened to Dave you’d understand..
Rinse, resend, pretend, deaf to the problem, blind till the end.
They say I can do it if I’d ever just listen.
They say I’ll do it right if I ever just listen.
ACT 3 -
“Depression” (spoken out loud)
What hour is it? (Did I sleep in again?)
What day is it? (Did I sleep in again?)
Only 3 hours sleep in three days. (Did I sleep in again?)
I was blessed with the skill of competency, a way to deconstruct the world around me, place it in simile then repeat what I was instructed proficiently. My mentality wasn’t constructed perfectly and when you're awake for several days you sleep, when it comes, with a sense of urgency. It causes what you would call some “inconsistency” to my.... Work....res-ume?
...This...this. is just a story.
I can't understand it right, I cannot listen.
We wont learn through our stories.
From despair to glory?
Is this is a story?
You could say there is some delay between how I’m scheduled and what I can say for when I’ll parlay to my job today.
When you don’t know when you are going to sleep you don’t know when you are going to wake up.
I was setup in a Black male presenting body, and society only guarantees me one line of financial stability. I must do physical labor if I want to be of anything in this democracy or find my way straight to the incarceree. Quite honestly I’m an intellectual nancy, a nerd of frivolous fancy, a connoisseur of humanity, more of a professor of the imaginary. If I can’t express myself intellectually or audibly the work prob gives me, terrible-Fucking-anxiety, but being scared is never “manly”. Perfunctory partitions to a life without decision and anything different met with friction to not meeting a stereotype built from racial derision and superstition.
They say I’ll do right if I ever just listen,
But my ears have yet to be christened in the babbling baptism called “revision” a historical division of strategically created traps, tied to those who have no shoes “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.”
And society breaks under the pressure, levers set in place long before I had the grace to find my place of the face of this world. I've twirled the dance taking any and every chance to find a space of the “sane”. I have changed my profession to fight the depression of never doing it just quite right. In spite of my best efforts I have to fit the contours of the crack fissure never delivers anything but pain and societal slivers, from a mentality that steals and withers.
It took me 35 years to decolonize the way my mind remembers, not just find myself in the forest of “Hotep Timbers” half rejected sinners, and the systematically enforced “Black Male” box of pain and embers. My life was just tender for the flames of capitalistic view of race and gender, labeled as a pretender anytime I did not enter with a loud swinging engorged member. Never a defender of misogyny but moving to actively disfigure the stereotypes that we have all engendered to be the center of our societies nerve center. I’m not left... i’m a cultural blender. Ready for it to be burned down, changed, and dismembered.
Please remember, I tried to play the game.
The name was “Feel the pain and hide it.”
To be, never look or find it.
Find your place,
and
Be trapped inside it.
From vision to the blinded.
I will remind you, I have tried it. Been on or inside, every “tried and true” moratorium of a capitalist vulturism. From being the grease in the wheels that turn them to the kindling on the fire of the engines that burn them. Uncertain of any option, I have risen, and been, and fallen through every industry in the American diaspora.
I’ve been a business owner and in the heat planting flora.
Been a government I.T. Admin, a bartender to those drinking away their sin (Did I sleep in again?)
, janitor cleaning bins, insurance claims adjuster till I keep sleeping in (Did I sleep in again?)
, worked as a locksmith,+ got the job from a friend (Did I sleep in again?)
. A social media consultant telling people when to press send, a paralegal for a non-profit, ran a stage production company till my partner stole our profit.
I’ve been a plumber, a carpet cleaner, a door to door meat seller, construction worker, data mining searcher, doorman for a homeless shelter, security standing lurker, roofing houses in summer swelter, a parking lot attended in -12 degrees called “inclement weather”,
(Did I sleep in again?)
worked for a printing company selling winter sweaters, a tele-help call in guy who was always told he could do better, i was unfettered from a job as a stagehand when my demand to sleep couldn’t keep the current call, stalled as an accountant when no would could account for hallucinations that had them “politely” remove me from my station. My relation to the musician persuasion met consternation when I couldn’t handle their cocaine fixation.
This is just a small piece of my career's reputation, I only address this with the stipulation for you to understand the situation.
When one flows from mania’s machinations to depressions suboptimal intrepidations there is a delineation of output to conservation. You're never aware of the creation of your mind, you body, and souls emotion, frustration, or motivation.
The downs aren’t a placation of emotional situations, but a life that has no memory of elation. Joy is as far as damnation and every failure you’ve ever made, is fresh ammunition for your own destruction.
There is a thing called “self-medication” often used as an answer to the changing psychological operation,
regulating the administration
of your feelings to more of a Rum and Coke based foundation.
(Did I sleep in again?)
People with Bi-Polar don’t often have the stimulation of the right neurons firing for civilization, and not being white causes complication to the implications of your actions. Black “males”, we cause intimidation in almost all of white cultural institutions, thus they institutionalize anything comprised outside the lines of colonialism. Reinforcing the schism through even a simple system of the 9-5, or keeping alive the dress code, the overworked load, or all the roads that lead to a white normalized culture.
A rupture in the structure pouring from the vulgar imbalance.
Burning in bloodied countenance
It runs through the historical sustenance of the very water we drink.
Flows in our subconscious like the oceans of the deep
11 days awake, still no sleep, I could no longer cry. I can only weep.
I can no longer cry. Only weep
ACT 4 -
“Help”
(spoken out loud)
This is just a story.
You will understand it right if you just listen.
How we learn is through stories.
From despair to glory,
This is...its.. just a story.
“To me coming from you, friend is a four letter word”
Not to speak untoward, but there is an absurd dichotomy between the strategy of building in an emotional deficit. A divided house can’t stand yet we demand the constant command of the “strong stable Black man”, canned calls from stalls of observers never observing the constant conundrum of hindering hypocrisy.
Fallacies built for the functionality of only the fervently wrong.
This culture's song asks for diversity, while maladroitly conforming to normality. Simplicity in ignoring the melody, tuning the frequency to mute
anything exceptionally different, and I have spent my time AS the “dregs of this society”
You see there are actually a few different definitions in the homeless category and I have run the gamut from the time I was 16.
Sleeping on people couches is one kind of thing, while it might not look like homeless it’s just another shade of the scene. Insomnia's blocking you from taking ends from means, it's just another form of begging, panhandling your friends for a moment at a chance for dreams.
Seams of your societal network begin unraveling, traveling for years through your list of peers from house to house.
The mouse of your friend group, the endless loops of being the unwanted guest.
This is the “best” of the homeless possibilities,
Sleeping in your car is your next ability after your friends and family leave, weave through the city streets, trying to find anything that meets, “a place to park” with shade for a week cause its 100 degrees even when night is at its peak. Reeking of sweating sleep, neck wrecked from fitting yourself on the tiny shelf of the back seat. From heat to negative 8, will you debate if you can’t afford the reward of running heat in your car so you don’t freeze to death, breath freezing over your lips as you try to come to grips with your morning shift, and the rift between cold and starvation. Salvation by just standing by the warmth of a coffee station, with endless sleep deprivation, and no financial institution to stop the feeling of starvation.
Please just listen.
Community is built from needs against degradation, the application to adjust for correlation is looking at the causation coming through statistical manipulation.
Try sleeping under an underpass for any duration.
You are wrong for this civilization from gestation, and we throw you out at any realization of difference through systematic subjugation.
In 22 years I have only spent 6 with anything you could call " a stable living situation."
Please Listen.
When the hungry come together, everything must be food.
When the homeless come together everything must be home.
When the insane come together everything must be crazy.
.
For me this has been my life. My wife's life.
Strife is what they built in.
It’s the intent.
They take from the base of community
Not an accident.
It’s what they always meant.
My stint as an artist offers me to take my crazy the farthest, creating an outlet so I don’t need to starve this part of me.
This is partially due to a path carved by those who love me. They came up with a strategy to get me medically in a place of comfortability to ask for help.
I was diagnosed at 8 but staked in a system that could never relate to the debate between my mind and being alive. I didn’t receive treatment till I was 35, I had strived in 30 years of sleepless chaos and confusion. Lost in the delusion I could do it myself.
Please get help.
Please... get... help.
It’s never that easy, it's more action than believing, more giving than receiving, more trying than retrieving, but it’s less hurting, more healing, more change than conceiving.
More truth than constant deceiving.
Completing the path to help might feel insurmountable, your pains uncountable, your thoughts never understandable. I promise these things can be manageable. To talk to others makes your feeling tangible, no longer self eating cannibal standing in the mandibles of your unsurpassable life destroying personal scandal.
There is a chance to handle....whatever it ...is.
Isn’t the chance worth the struggle, subtle nudges and rebuttals from a qualified medical professional. Yeah some of them, and IT can be awful, but its always better than finding yourself at the end of the bottle.
I am now on medication, and relational therapy, relieving the memory boxes trapped in the attic, peace of mind instead of static, breaking habits instead of addict, living as yourself instead of traumatic manic morose.
A ghost put to fleet, the surface to the deep, the patch when the blood seeps,
New finish on the antique, options for the bleak,
A chance to cry,
Not always weep.
Keeping the truth from allegory
Remember This is just a story,
something to maybe help you sleep
Reap, the heap of rewards of not being stuck in a destructive dance.
Take a chance to stop the screams sound. pounding every pain, to the painful to end.
You can hear it if you listen
Insomnia’s my closest friend.
CAKE...”a four letter word.”.
https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.8a23