Is This Scary?

Poems

Jacob Scheier

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781773057200
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

A challenging exploration of mental illness and disability from Governor General's Award winner Jacob Scheier.

Is This Scary? digs deep into internal landscapes of suffering, including depression and anxiety, chronic physical ailment, and rare neurological malady. With its many eccentric songs and odes to medications and medical procedures, this book is full of both levity and unapologetic lament. Pushing back against societal stigma, Is This Scary? unflinchingly addresses experiences of psychiatric institutionalization and suicidality, without either romanticizing or pathologizing them. Scheier rejects much of the mainstream cultural views of mental illness, subverting the biochemical model by emphasizing the radical subjectivity of mental suffering. While the poems render the difficulty of communicating pain to others, they defiantly celebrate its expression and evocation through visceral lyricism.

Scheier also challenges our culture's desire to be inspired by stories of "triumphing" over illness and disability. Nothing is overcome here, the journey from illness to wellness is one of narrative and aesthetic disruption. The perpetually incomplete search for self and home is ultimately at the heart of this book: along with being a person with disabilities, the poet-speaker identifies as a Diaspora-Jew, engaging exile as a chronic state of being that isn't intended to be resolved, but rather explored, expressed, and honored.

Ode to Prednisone

Herr Pill! You murder sleep.
Eugenicist Cortisol, re-make me—
ox-strong, moon-faced, onioned-skin.
Hugs are dangerous.
Performance-enhancing drug for poets—
you triple feelings. Elegies for the late train & spilled milk.
Anxiety is Everything.
Threatened by the light that brightens the dark.
Dread tolerates Ativan.
Faustian Chemical, you resurrect myths
like Lazarus. He was never the same.
Charon-ian Steroid,
I've been to that shore the dead clamour for.

Dear Sam, This Isn’t a Suicide Note

In a way, it’s an anti-suicide letter.

But I understand if you don’t read it

because you may have already killed yourself

as we agreed was your right. We saw it the same way

during that war on ourselves or, to be more straightforward,

the Psych Ward. There were plenty of atheists

in that foxhole, not to mention the occasional Satanist

like the Zyprexa-shut-eyed girl

who lost internet privileges for feeding

her psychosis on occult sites. But they

didn’t take away my copy of The Divine Comedy

because it was Christian I guess

and I was merely depressed.

You were the only unmedicated person on the floor.

First mental patient I’ve ever known diagnosed

purely with an existential crisis. Though when a resident

mentioned Cymbalta, you were adamant:

didn’t want a pill to take away what little you felt,

even if it was pain. I wondered,

doing my best Mrs. Ramsay, if the right med

could make you see a silvered, rough wave

and proclaim, It is enough! It is enough!

But didn’t say so, as I hadn’t read

To the Lighthouse since this condition

caused waves to appear sharp, jagged. Like everything else

in this world, piercing. And you had a point

about the pill. Neither the benzos nor gaba-

pentin had caused me to give up entirely

on the idea of suicide.

The most well-groomed

mental patient I ever saw, you must have shaved

every day before breakfast. Your neck gleamed

in your colour-guarded

V-necks. With my sagging beard

and untamed blond hair, I looked like Christ

but mean. Every night we walked the same square

of corridor. We discussed Camus more than Woolf.

You said you had to draw a line somewhere—

at the small but stifling compromises that

add up then suddenly define a life.

And of course there was a woman

who loved you but also didn’t.

On one of my day passes

I bought you Chekhov’s Selected

because I was sure you were in it.

My inscription said, because

you had mentioned it

as an alternative, Move to Russia.

Don’t kill yourself. I didn’t

sign my name. I told you my plans

when I got out: therapy, MBCT, volunteer

somewhere, find god, keep busy. You said

I had a lot of will and I agreed, but

my real issue was a lack

of faith. We could both quote from The Myth

of Sisyphus. I read it

when my life felt relatively full, agreed

then with Camus and thought living worth it.

You read it a few weeks before you tried.

These days we’re both on the outside. Yesterday,

we met at the Starbucks as we would on hour-long passes

but now returned to it as free men with all the time

in this world. It might have been the last day

I’ll ever see you but that’s true

of so many people who enter

and exit our lives. Couldn’t they all have

killed themselves by now? I like

what you said about drawing a line,

which is not the same as agreeing with it.

Maybe, you are the only person I’ve met

who isn’t afraid to die. Though I might ask

if, like me, on the evening I took myself

to lie beneath that willow tree, you are afraid

of life. Over lattes you reminded me

of the Dante line I often quoted in the corridor:

There is no greater sorrow than to recall

our times of joy in wretchedness. Neither of us

can listen to music. It hurts in a way

we can’t explain but understand

when the other says it. Time passes

for you, I imagine, as you smoke and look out

at the lake from your condo, a glass palace

with a name like Solaris, advertising an adventure

in urban solitude. I tell you how on the night of your attempt

you were the Dorian Gray behind the condo ad,

drinking on your leather sofa with a bottle

of fine whiskey and a stomach full of pills.

And you laugh. You really don’t

do much else but smoke and wait

for something to change. The only structure

in your life now is when a nurse comes

to dress slept-through wounds

made by days on the hardwood.

During one of our marathons,

talking around the corridors, I observed

we were lost in a circular labyrinth. You said

it was a pretty good metaphor. I said

when I get out of here I might use it in a poem.

Thought, but didn’t say, I would dedicate

the poem to you, wondering if it might be

an elegy. By the time I wrote it, I figured

I could, assuming you were still alive, tell you

what we found in the labyrinth. Something like

we just needed to kill the part of us

that wanted to die. But I still don’t have a strong case

for you against death, which means

I don’t have much of a case for myself either. I...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Dear Sam, This Isn’t a Suicide Note
• Palinopsia Song or Ode to Some Fucking Bird
• Ode to Prednisone
• Crohn’s Song
• Symptoms Include a Compulsive Desire to be Understood
• Poem for a Broken Bone
• Election Night in the Ward
• Ode to Zopiclone
• To My Friends Who Did Not Visit Me in the Mental Hospital
• Circular Labyrinth
• The Chestnut Tree Café
• Self-Parenting
• Noonday Yahweh
• Song for a Colonoscopy
• The Spaz
• To a Child Whose Mother Has Not Yet Died
• Song to the Suicides
• Note
• Metamorphosis
• Jumbo Elegy
• God as We Understood Him
• On Missing a Train Stop
• Songs from an Emergency Room
• Nearly 50% of Toronto Islands underwater after recent deluge of rain: City
• In Praise of Losing Things
• Ode to Remicade
• Infusion Song
• And Then Job Answered God from inside the Whirlwind They Were Both Caught inside Of
• Job’s Girlfriend
• Lamotrigine Song
• Re: hey, and i might have cancer
• Harold and Maude Revisited
• Wanting to Not Want to Die
• My Last Depression
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright