Madness

On my way to madness
I took off my housedress,
left it loosely arranged like a donut
on the floor
where I thought
I would die alone.

Then I leapt,
not out the window,
but to the next room
where I was found
by officers and neighbors
naked on a puffed, white blanket,
swollen with victory
still stuttering to God.

The battle had been won
between light and evil,
predator and victim,
snake and dove.

I had been deeply afraid,
but when I pressed palms with death,
I found myself in great company.

Does an alarm sound in the heavens
when a child of the Earth
is approaching the gates?

Who curates the unseen team
that guides us beyond?

I purged the house,
littered the lawn with
a thousand glittering buttons,
drowned books in garbage pails,
laid out old clothes as bait,
for the demons.

I was instructed to run fans
to scramble my scent,
stack hangers as traps,
cover every black hole
that could be used by spies.

Reflective surfaces
became aid to keep watch,
dance, a release
blue flowered shawls draped me
in the Holy Mother’s protection.

Now in my sane mind I ask –
When does medicine become addiction?
Creativity, delusion?
Imagination, mania?

Is trauma the gateway to enlightenment?

How can the cries of our ancestors
be soothed if we don’t fall through
dimensions to sing beyond the veil?

And how will we ever shake loose
that which is plaguing us
if we are afraid
to worship wildly
in a house
,which is seldom visited?

Today I Asked the Butterfly

Today I asked the butterfly
what it’s like to be a butterfly.
She perched on the purple skirt
of a petunia and asked –
“What’s a butterfly?”

I blushed with shame
at the notion of assigning a name
to someone who never named herself,
someone who is so absorbed in being
that she doesn’t need identity.

I started to move in ways
I had never moved before.
Losing my name meant
I could become the unknown,
a pattern, an echo, a prayer.

I mimicked the bear, the great moose,
the rhino, the squirrel.
I morphed and shifted,
but when I thought of the butterfly
I felt the most uplifted.

I didn’t know the God in me
until I became the small,
winged one who drinks from
the hearts of flowers.

Chelsea Lynn La Bate had her first psychotic episode at the age of 39 in her home in Asheville, NC. Since then she has suffered three more episodes. The poems in her newly released book “Free Roses,” tracks the ecstasy of psychosis and the interconnectivity of all living creatures which she experienced while in trance. She now lives in Florida.