When the Voices Come for You

You're crazy!

 

Everyone has said it.

 You have said it while laughing at a friend,

 you have said it with an edge of trepidation

 as a love interest show his true colors.  

 You've probably been called it.  

 

But most people don't mean it, and they don't know what it means.  

 

Fort those of us who are crazy, it isn't funny or cute.

 It is the essence of being stalked by an invisible monster, breathing down our necks.  

We run from it at first.  

We fight the strange desires

 to flick the lights on and off three times,

to cover windows in tin foil.

 We don't answer the voices.

 We pretend we don't hear them,

 or that it's the TV or the radio,

 or the neighbors,

 

and not the crazy in your head.

 

But the crazy is persistent.  It's omnipotent.  

 

Perhaps we go to a doctor,

who gives us pills to kill the crazy,

 but all it does is thicken our heads against it, and everything else.  

And we tire of our shaking hands, of the drooling and the weight gain.

 We tire of being too slow at slogging out of the fog that infects our brain

to participate with our friends and families.

 

We say, "Okay, Crazy, you win.  Come and get me."  

 

And the voices come for us.  

They come with the swift and fiery vengeance of Gabriel,

and severs who we were from who we have become,

and the person we were gets locked in a tiny prison deep inside us,  

where first she fights,

and then she weeps

 and then she lays down and dies

and all that is left

ALL THAT IS LEFT

is the Crazy.