The first time you stop taking the pills, you start to believe the bottle’s warning labels: cold sweats, shivers, longing, thoughts that you thought you’d stop having. Your first year of college you will meet a girl who tells you that she likes you better when you’re medicated, as if you are a garden of demons and your antidepressants are the right amount of winter. You dream of exorcism. All you do is dream for at least 14 hours a day. Your doctors tell you maybe that’s just what you need.

The second time you stop taking the meds, you have an easier time getting erections. That’s the only thing filling about missing your doses. You fuck, you jack off, you cry. Sometimes school and work mix themselves into these cycles long enough to make you want to fuck, jack off, cry. You can do all those things now, almost like you are rehabilitated. You will lie awake with a dry itch wanting to rip off your skin, realizing that there is no longer a difference between what keeps you alive and what feels like it’s killing you. You pray these drugs won’t leave a rash.

The third time, you stop taking the drugs, you start sleeping again. Your figure trims down and the migraines come back and the warning labels tell you you’re at risk for seizure. Something new seizes you every day anyway. Your roommate asks you why you’re crying. You stutter and leave the room. You’re always leaving rooms, conversations, classes. You’re trying to piece together whatever’s left. You always did love stained glass but you were still never good at mosaics.

The fourth time: you ask about treatment options, you are frank with your therapist and tell him you’re getting bad again. He freaks out, makes an appointment for you, reminds you of hospitals. You’re already tired but now it feels like his fist is practically down your throat. It's nice that he’s worrying. You want to be worried. You want to be something. Later that week, you find yourself praying into open pill bottles. You know no one’s really listening, You skip the sex and the porn and just cry. This time, all you do is cry. All you ever do is cry.

Yesterday, the smell of pineapples, the pearlescent dawn mist

Over the sleepy Pacific, a kind of lullaby, an almost cure for

Understanding: I did not want to fall in love here.

Rarely, these pleas are heard over the tides' indigo moan

All asking what miracles could come from whipped steel water

I wanted to be someplace I could hold you.

Nowhere is the line between a shore and a wish. A grotto snores

Over a grove of citrus trees, a mountain weepingly birthing a river.

Now, a city of lights dream-stops to greet secret-laden stars

Moon-song and moon-hush glistening on the fractured lagoon:

Enter silence, exit slumber. Enter want, exit rest.

I am awake now and full of morning.

So tomorrow, a storm seizures near the island, flashes

Keeping track of wayward mango trees.

Yellow trains bustle people back to the ocean's lips.

You are an answered prayer too far away.

Off the coast, a temple of whale-priests chant for new faith

Under clouds that translate sunbeams. Everything sails home.

Shout of pear blossom cloaks the city in incandescent memory

Under bridges of forgotten joy and wayward streetlight

Don't stay; I have nothing to give.

Despair of sunset croaks out between corner shops and buses

Evening settles over the people and blesses them with busyness

Now a shelter for crowds religiously trying to forget how to dream

Let me lay here and weep. Please.

Yesterday's chatter still tucked in the whispers of park trees

Tremble of leaves a chorale in the face of concrete and steel

Hurried cars stampede their pedestrian rhythm on resigned highways

I am tired of begging for relief.

Starlight whimpers, barely strong enough to piece haloes of airplanes,

Daring to push through the almost-threat of fog and weary storms

Even my breath is asking to be spared.

First blush of night's glory mirrors off the sea in the deep, embracing dark

Engulfing the shore in a likeness of angel legion and synthetic sunrise

And I still have nothing left to give:

The skyscrapers all reach out into the infinite and find themselves wanting.