There are many brands of mental illness.You’ve got your garden variety schizophrenia, Bi-polar, chronically depressed, OCD, PTSD, ADHD (not to be confused with LGBT). There’s Anxiety disorders, Mood disorders, Personality disorders, Alcoholism, Drug addiction, Paranoia, Narcism and insomnia. 

If you string all those psychobabble labels together and allow them to infest a soul, you’ll find the makings of a poet. Poets possess a menagerie of mental health disorders. They come with many of the same symptoms defined in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often known as the “DSM,” To be a poet is to be demented, a lune, batshit crazy, fool-hearted, delusional, insane and a vessel of junkyard beauty. 

Poets hear voices, see visions, are paranoid of the demons and devils that chatter incessantly inside their echoey heads. Some are being channeled by Jesus or Lucifer. Some claim to have been abducted by UFO’s who’ve inserted micro chips under their skin. There’s the ones with tin foil caps covering their skulls to blockout the micro waves that control their thoughts. They possess super powers, they are the cursed, the blessed and the god forsaken chosen ones. 

As far fetched as this may sound, these poets believe they can inhabit your brain and silently transmit disembodied emotions into your flesh. They scribble little black markings, or what we call letters on paper, arranging them into words and sentences. If these markings are assembled with perfection, they have the power to unlock revelations hidden within the readers gray matter. These words; these poems exist only in the readers imagination. They can’t be seen or touched, they mysteriously seep from the subconscious to the conscious mind. The author may be dead, but their words carry on in the readers head, like the breath of gods, omniscient, immortal——omnipotent. 

How crazy is that?

This is more than an observation I’m sharing with you, it’s a warning. If you choose to go down that path of becoming a poet, then you’ll need to go all the way. You’ll have to fearlessly peer into the heart of the darkness. You’ll have to force yourself to see and feel the things that most avoid. And there you’ll find death threats, condemned love, contaminated truth, the meaninglessness of life, a fools complacency, naked truth and simmering nihilism. 

If you can get past the fear and madness, if you are willing to endure the song of the sirens, you will find your own voice. There will be peace and wholeness. In the sadness there is beauty, behind crumbling walls of the fortress there’s freedom. In this secret place, time means nothing, reality is malleable, love is forever sustained and a poet is ordained.