Hard to Bear

Static swamp
of festering muck.
The only sounds are the croaks of frogs
and the erratic bubbling of gases.

I’ve lived with depression for most of my life.

From days when I was too young to name it,
to the inside of a psychiatric ward
where the nurse wrote down the word
“dysthymia”
on a piece of paper;
should I have cringed,
should I have recoiled at the site
of my not-so-personal demon?

Maybe it’s not that I feel too little,
but that I feel so strongly
and then either chastise myself
or numb out completely
that is the source of my suffering.

A gift that I find it difficult to bear
is still a gift,
a load that I call a burden
may not be what I name it.

It’s made me hard and ferocious at times,
weak and malleable at others,
but those experiences cannot fully make me –
I refuse to let them.

I am the ink that flows
and the paper that receives it.
I am the space between us
and I whisper in the voids within us.

I am a poet,
and this much I can bear
with believing.