Devil of the Night

(Bipolar Disarrangement of Words)

by Michael Lee Johnson

Come write with me. I need to take you on a brief night journey that has already started.

The devil is the night because my night has holes in it. My brain is deep-fried then frozen in a pan and seldom goes anywhere. Sometimes I can’t even figure out how I deep-fried my thoughts or deep-fried my thinking.

I find myself very alone when I’m perplexed like this. My breath comes out like cinnamon and my words are lethargic on my vocal cords. I’m starting to think I’m nothing more than a condiment or a legendary troll. Sometimes I feel like a stone giant in my brain and sometimes I feel like a cranium dwarf.

I’m not a writer of fiction or poetry at best. I ride high at times with joy; I ride low at times like a bent-over spoon. When I mix all this mess in a cereal bowl I want to scream out loud.

On another topic, being the shadow of who I am I reach out to touch the snow-filled night, but my fingertips don’t feel the cold. Is there something wrong with my senses between the warm and the cold within me? The street lights the darkness of this tale I spin; must be poetry of some sort bewitched.

I can’t even write poetry without the advice of editors I don’t know that well, and it makes me feel in and out of doubts. I’m clumsy with my words and the way they form or don’t form, I guess. Sometimes I think I’m talking to myself and there is no audience; but that’s fiction, correct?

Let me ask you, is someone crazy enough to pay me for this writing while I remain in this institution and insurance is forced to pay the bill? Do you think delusions will make me the writer I’ve always dreamed my nightmares would lead me to? I’m not trained for things like this, you know; it could end this way: I can only write a few paragraphs at a time.

Outside my hospital window there are snowflakes, thin, steady, adding white shadows to dark tree limbs, there are holes in this night, hanging so low.

I see brown doves at 3 a.m.; I register these thoughts as Frankenstein. The devil is the night, and I fall asleep with my head near my writing pad.