Fortune-Cookie-Industrial Complex – by Erica Williams
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You are capable, creative, competent, careful
My psychiatrist says
I want to tell him alliterations agitate my anxiety
I want to tell him to stop eating the fortunes from cardboard flavoured biscuits
And gorging on pages from the DSM5
I want to tell him the DSM5 and fortune cookies sing the same tune
In a literary sense
I mean badly executed speculative fiction—A beige diet
I worry for his gut health
In the dense quiet room where he will exhume my broken feelings like fossils
I want to tell him to eat some more
Poetry
Tell him how to heal his digestive health with all things fermented and fizzy
Tell him it should – if working correctly – make him dizzy
And perhaps a little frayed
At the edges
I want to tell him that if he ate more poetry, his eyes might see
Invisible things
Like power, which is:
When he arrives on the ward in a stiff suit smelling of cedar
My shoes are forced to realise
How deeply they are grieving
The absence
Of their laces
And I can’t face him
The taker of shoestrings
The maker of my meaning
The teller of fortunes in which I am competent, capable, creative, and yet
In the subtext of poetry he cannot read
A man has made me unable to flee
And I feel trapped
Wrapped in the paradoxical softness of involuntary safety
Which is just another way to describe
My childhood
I am meant to be healing from it
If my psychiatrist ate more poetry he might understand the irony
In asking me to learn I am free when he will not give back
My shoelaces
Creative. Competent. Carnivalesque in my suicide proof dress
Yellow doc martens with their tongues lolling like long dead things
Hands heavy with rings that feel like my most precious things—
Simply because I have been allowed
to keep them
You are capable, creative, competent, careful
My psychiatrist fortune teller thief keeper says
And I want to throw the stone I am holding right at his head Not to injure him but Just to crack the glass pane of power that separates us
I want him to see the vulnerability
Of my shoes
Can’t he feel the tension between my cowering doc martens
And the balled fist of his gold watch threatening to pummel me?
I guess his microbiome is barely breathing
He doesn’t eat that which has been fermented and fouled
Into feeling something
I want to tell him poetry falls into the category of fermented foods
I want to tell him I think there are so many words he could consume
To better understand complex trauma—like
Time is an accordion played by the musician of my memory
And when it collapses into the final note
I might find myself floating above a girl Searching
And this damn stone does nothing to ground me back into my bones See I don’t think he knows that when a body becomes a powerless thing By his own making
I cannot
Safely
Return To it
So when he is around, fortune telling
I will assert my autonomy simply by climbing out of my nasal cavities To observe the situation of our bodies from above
I will not ground Into his territory
I think about eating the stone in front of him instead Swallowing it whole like a supersized zopiclone tablet
Becoming soporific
A performance piece to disrupt the fortune-cookie-industrial complex
Of him
I think about telling him my nightly hysterics Midnight girl soaked through and soapy with sedatives Standing in front of those hospital mirrors that disfigure reflections Circus memories
My clownclad body made bulbous
My head shrunken in
Idiotic
I feel like Sisyphus encountering a mirror
For the first time. I chant
Capable, creative, competent, careful
Cackling
Crackling
I look like if I asked my dog to draw a picture
Of a madwoman.
My dog is more capable, creative, competent, and careful
Than me. Than him. Than any of us.
I miss resting my head against her chest to feel the balloon of her lungs When she breathes in her rest
When she breathes I remember how lungs can
Become me
I wonder if my psychiatrist ever found Sisyphus
In his bathroom mirror
Which would be like finding me
In his bathroom mirror
We are the same, I think,
Two humans with different relationships to our own
Shoes?
Ironic how he wraps a costly noose around his neck
Each morning
And maybe it’s best for my own safety to be temporarily banned from the possession Of shoelaces
But I would like the dignity of a conversation
See I was only trying to escape from the memories
A creative, capable, courageous solution
When being alive felt like a trap set by my abuser to keep me breathless and braced Under the weight of his body
So many years After my escape
See I want to tell my fortune teller thief that I did not want to die
Only
I could not figure out how extract him from my body
He seemed to live in me like a parasite feeding on the fear of my flashbacks
So my body felt owned and not
My own
It still feels
Owned and not my own
Without shoelaces
I think
The fortune cookie-industrial complex needs to understand
The poetic tension between my lace-less shoes
And a psychiatric gold watch
It is a conversation that must be mediated by the language of power And oppression. Only then Might I begin to stop cowering behind my own life but
Don’t curse me capable, creative, competent, and careful When you have dressed me in a clown suit and rendered me captive in my own body
This is not how you treat a person
Made of poetry
Anyway
Many years later I will decree
The fortune-cookie-industrial complex needs to consume more fermented foods And living things And stories
It does not work to curse a woman back into her body trap
With comfort words
Just like a father would do—and then plead
Not guilty
You cannot be a mimicry of abuse and its poetics
Then expect a woman to tend to her wounds in a different translation Of the same text
Tell her she is many bright things that you will steal – aside from her rings –
It is confusing. Involuntary ECT, a section, and she does not
Get
Therapy
Still
The fortune-cookie-industrial complex will never plead
Guilty
Eventually the thief returns my grieving shoes Their laces
I shake myself of his alliterations
I am wild and wily and wielding my words
I never got better in the suicide suit
I just kept eating poetry
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Image: Anastasiia Chaikovska - Pexels
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