Peroxide Brain

By: Holly Yates

Content Warning

I bend my arms up and inject the needle into my right pupil

life is so much fun when every breath tastes of bleach

does god laugh at my unmistakable, beautiful insanity

as I’m hands deep in this little make-shift lobotomy?

I know they’re all on the stakes again, too many saviors

standing over bodies and I can’t feel where I put all the bandages

 

doctor! doctor! attendant! you will surely need more dressings

because blood always streams downward from the eyes

did Jesus die for men in lab coats carrying pills, self-proclaimed liberators?

my brain oozes in my bare hands with all its eroded peroxide

in the end nothing matters except  psycho-drama, psycho-surgery

watch me as I extract my misery because they name it hysteria

 

I take the tissue and place it in the landfill of mental disorders

I remove the rod, and ask myself: when did I fix myself with plaster?

I glued myself together, but never get it right with each leucotomy

tell me, mother, sister, father, brother, where am I? and can you even see me?

I’m tired of fallen angels, I’ve already fallen on the filthy floor, praying for light

parts of me in arms of scalpels when I just want arms of an embrace

 

so I’m here moving my tongue but no one hears me scream out:    s a v e m e

I can see God spelled backwards in the words attendants use for depression

the black dress of an attendant blurs, I see her big eyes in fluorescent gleam

she pulls out a needle from her pocket, syringe stuck full of glue

injections never change because tears still reflect inside mirrors

doctor knows, attendant knows, precision proves hard in a 300 second procedure

 

strange and stranger to think doctors won’t ever request lobotomies

attendant injects needle into my arm but I’m full of novocaine and don’t want help

I stare at the pools of blood on the floor, surely they will need more bleach

but you can only find it inside of me because I’m doused with pure insanity

so take apart my head and say it’s alright because doctors here use sterile gauze

maybe I’m just a little girl soaked in screams and God never even notices

 

but I’m laughing because God is dead and no one cares because believing is seeing

which one sounds the best, transorbital, lateral, frontal, prefrontal?

I’m only asking because this morgue needs more press coverage and bandages  

and everyone around me is sewed together, their outside haphazardly salvaged

I hear them scratching inside chrome compartments and scraping their rotten minds

except I’m laughing and crying because I force- feed myself expired peroxide

 

and lobotomy is the only word that matters in this story, it pierces the white of my eye and I saved the doctors all the trouble, keep all that precious plaster! for I’ve already taken myself apart, brain underneath floor, because I won’t let them touch my mental disease anymore.