Mental Illness Poem

How Mental Illness Changes Your Perspective

I am a 55-year-old transplanted up-state New Yorker who migrated to Garden City, Kansas, in 1983. A tree hugger and nature lover since childhood, I fell in love with the stark beauty of the Kansas Plains. I am disabled with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, and Kansas has been my "healing land" where I have found both recovery and despair. One day in February, while riding the bus home, I was experiencing a serious depression, which is when this poem came about.

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Colors Fall

Published by Family Friend Poems April 2017 with permission of the Author.

I hate the way the colors seem to me now,
In dead of winter.
They fade away with every choice I make.
The only honest hues I spy
Are the cotton candy blues and pinks
Of winter sky,
And the messy, dingy grey
Of melted snow on lonely sidewalks...

Only a miracle now will transform
My bewildered pea-sized brain
Into a healthy clicking mind again.
The thoughts that do come are
Circular and slow.
Where have all the wild roses gone?
I miss their color constantly.
Like merry mauve and
Startling pink signposts,
They pointed the way to a kinder,
More accepting world--a world where
I once belonged.

In winter, colors fall away, hope fades,
And the mentally ill, (myself included),
Hide ourselves away in dark caves of despair,
Our thoughts trembling and weak,
Our imagined sins the only crimson spot
In a tumbling, jumbled up,
Colorless world...

more by Judith Chiorazzi

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