Freddy's Collection of Poems and Stories

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JUST WATER    by Freddy Bosco

I come home.

I am thirsty

From my journey.

Water is here:

Clear, pure, cold.

As I lift the glass

I am washed away

By the contentment

The relief of my thirst.

The water is gold to me.

I feel the taste

Of that which has no flavor.

 All my life is in this:

I call my Lord,

He answers immediately.

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THE GLOW OF YOUR BEING

OUTSHINES EVERY STAR

    by Freddy Bosco

All alone, fortified by faith,

 I crawl within, eagerly

Seeking Light, the cave

Of my isolation is tight,

Even as it contains that spark

Of infinity, with its fathomless depth.

All around me I am lit.

I bathe in the warmth

Of the divinity radiating my heart.

Gasps of delight expand me

As I recognize the source of life,

Breathing me, pulsing me

As I float end over end,

Gone in that bliss.

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IN MY NEXT INCARNATION

Those who subscribe to the theory
Of reincarnation insist we come back
To a sea of consequences. Pondering
Such notions, I take stock of my acts,
All the damage I’ve done, all the pain
I’ve inflicted, but also I wonder if
I haven’t also been soothing, here
And there, causing a smile, giving
Just a word of hope to someone?
Keeping a spiritual resume is work,
Which may be the vain striving
That finds us doing the right thing
For the wrong reason: “How will this
Look to the Lords of Karma? Will
They cast me down to Hell, or,
Will they smile on my case?” All
I wish—should I return—is to be
A vessel of grace, one always ready
To comfort others, one forever set
To praise and serve the Master
No matter what the form or face
The Divine chooses to assume.
Not that I have any plans to return,
But should my heart come back
To search the earth for this water,
Bless me again, please with thirst.

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How Mental Illness Saved My Life

By Freddy Bosco

It took me years to realize it. Many years after developing mental illness, another consumer asked me, “I don’t remember what it was you said you were doing before you got sick.” It hit me like a freight train. I had been putting my life on the line! Had I not broken down and been carted off to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, I might not be alive today.

The circumstances of my depression are mysterious to me to this day. That’s okay. As my teacher says, “I can live with mystery.” An alcoholic romance that went bad and a professional rejection combined to make me seek what is known as a Geographical Cure. From Denver, I took a train to New York, with all my possessions, looking for streets of gold. I had all the makings of a complete disaster by the time I got to Manhattan.

To those who have never done New York, let me quote another individual whose experience was not unsimilar to mine. He said, “New York is completely full of bad influences.” And that is a large understatement. The rotten Apple is so full of disease and corruption that any normal person who goes there soon becomes neurotic. And neurotics like me soon—as I did—become psychotic.

It was my intention to get very big in New York, so big that the love of my life would change her mind and come back to me. I was willing to do anything to get ahead. Strange how the heart or what the mind thinks is the heart will do to achieve success. All my years of carefully formed morals and conscience went into the first dumpster I found. I was an immigrant in psychic space.

There I was: open to possibilities that I would never have thought about twice before. The Big Time was waiting just around the next corner. Funny, but I went around the corner so many times I found myself chasing my own tail, wondering where my lucky break was. The remarkable thing was, I did manage to eke out some outstanding achievements before I cracked.

I was lunching at the Algonquin with New Yorker editors, going to parties with New York Times reporters and getting good tables at Elaine’s. None of it meant anything; my heart was broken, sick and smashed, and I could find no solace in anything I was doing. I self-medicated with scotch, and still woke with dread every day. Climbing into my Brooks Brothers finery in the morning, I pushed myself into the game like climbing a stone cliff.

One day at work, I snapped and came completely unglued. I was an editor at a Park Avenue CPA firm, with two secretaries, six reporters, a designer and…one nervous breakdown. They took me to Bellevue in an ambulance, injected me with Thorazine, and stood back while all the toll of my crazy life unwrapped from me like bandages coming off a mummy.

Finally it came to me that I had to get out of New York. The blow of that failure and all the residual shock of my illness left me virtually speechless for many months to come. By and by,
I came to accept the fact that I have a problem. I have a condition which handicaps me, but I can be treated. Now, 27 years after my awful collapse, I live a reasonable life. I am on medication, I get good therapy, and I stay busy with part-time employment and volunteer work with people whose hearts, just as mine did, need to be reminded what a pleasure life can be.

After so many years in recovery, from mental illness compounded by alcoholism, I am still working on issues. I do not expect spiritual perfection; I content myself with spiritual progress. The famous 12 steps help me, as does my family, loyal friends and a community of people devoted to the proactive cause. I am like the Hanged Man, who had to be turned upside down to attain enlightenment. I do not claim a great spiritual achievement. All I know is that the guy who came back from New York is ready to greet life on its own terms, instead of the harebrained agenda I left with.

So if it took getting sick to wake up, then I am grateful for every step—no matter how painful so many of them were—that it has taken for me to be able to sit here and address a reader who may be struggling with terrible self-doubt and discouragement. Rain falls on every life, but I have no doubt that we were born to experience happiness on a daily basis. I have no idea what’s to come, not for myself or anyone else, but I am here, serene. I can’t see yesterday or tomorrow.
All I know at this moment is this moment. It is enough for me.

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The Emperor’s New Strategy

By Freddy Bosco

Our imperial shenanigans make Ancient Rome look like a nursery school. Cramming an additional 21,500 troops into Baghdad to kill the rebels reveals to me a desperately uninspired commander who is not supported by the American public nor the Congress or even his own generals. We throw good money after bad. The war has cost $800 billion so far.

Do you know why we invaded Iraq? Because all the King’s horses and all the King’s men lacked adequate intelligence. We’ve got Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in recent history dismissing the public outcry as the babble of “those talking heads on television.” We’ve gotten word that W’s regime is itching to get Iran to show the slightest provocation so we can expand the war.

Wall Street, meanwhile, is doing its own escalation, trading blood for money, reaching its highest mark ever. And on the home front? Astronauts, once thought of as heroic, are out to kill each other; children sag from obesity; and our Southwest, even with the pathetic fence, has begun to become the Amexican nation in which identities are routinely stolen, jeopardizing the safety of some innocent citizens so that ambitious but otherwise undocumented workers can do menial labor.

Yesterday, I tried to do my civic duty by calling the IRS with a simple question about a publication they had sent me pertaining to 2006 taxes. I spent a good hour on the phone getting bounced from worker to worker, having to explain my question to a good half-dozen “representatives” before someone would give me an answer.

When I went out to check the mail, I saw the letter I had left out for the carrier lying on my front steps. Is this whole Empire falling apart? Randy Newman, in his song “State of the Union,” said the end of an empire is a messy business. Meanwhile, life goes on: we spend millions for ball players while schoolteachers starve, and we build our workday around email jokes and cups of Starbucks latte.

Small wonder that Eli Lilly rakes in billions for anti-psychotic medications and American sleep is disturbed. Here we are: 300 million compulsive gamblers going for broke in the Middle East while China continues to eat us up from the inside out. I recently read a good assessment of that particular part of our Decline and Fall: “They loan us money so that we can buy their t-shirts.”
Even the last miniature American flag I examined had “Made in China” written on it.

Good morning, America, how are you? Let me take your temperature, but don’t be surprised if your blood pressure looks like Mt. Vesuvius about to explode. Our whole culture seems to be toppling under the weight of its own contradictions. We’ve got an individual at the helm who truly believes he is doing God’s will. Will the outcome of the 2008 presidential election save us, or will we just be switching seats on the Titanic?

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EFFORT OR PRIVILEGE?

Sometimes, I feel as weak
As the winter sun, vainly
Trying to smile, behind
A veil of clouds. What mask
Of struggle hides my joy?
Warehouses full of baggage
Emburden me in my quest
To fly birdlike, free to soar.
All through my ache, I know
I was born to celebrate this life,
Not to pound out the blues
No: not again. Confound it!
My inheritance of addlebrain
Malaise sets me up to practice
With a longing borne from pain
Which only tells me to rejoice;
I know, marrow deep and deeper,
That Divinity smiles on me,
Even as I run, a rodent in a box,
Looking for a corner of escape,
While sure contentment waits
For my unconditional surrender. .

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Do You Feel Weird?

By Freddy Bosco

You’re standing there at the supermarket waiting to buy your provisions, or else you’re there on the bus as people are getting on, and something strange overcomes you. Everything seems to go flat and the scene looks to be in suspended animation. Think of what it would be like to have this sensation all the time, and you’ll have a clue as to what a large percentage of the population goes through. Welcome to…what euphemism should we employ here? Just a touch of head stuff, let’s say.

An old Italian proverb says it all: “Sono tutto mondo pazzo,” which means, the whole world is crazy. I’ve never met a psychiatrist (I have known one or two) who wasn’t honest enough to admit the truth of the old proverb I quoted, with the qualifier: it’s all a matter of degree.

We sometimes see unfortunate individuals afflicted with terrible…head stuff, to go with our agreed upon euphemism. Out there on the street, ragged and muttering, perhaps performing a ritual action with a personal meaning not readily apparent to anyone else, they act out an action, like folding and refolding and folding again the cuffs of their jeans. With apparent oblivion to the ridicule of all those who happen upon the scene, they go about their compulsive behavior.

In recent years, some miraculous advances have been made in psychiatric medicine. Regular folks like you and me take Prozac, although they may not tell anyone not intimately acquainted with them. How many of those with a prodigious thirst for alcohol are actually just trying to medicate themselves for…head stuff? That manager you work for slips off from the office every morning for an hour, to do what? Maybe to go to her analyst. Nothing new about that, but we’re light years ahead in terms of accepting the necessity to treat this heretofore hush-hush form of illness.

If you live on Capitol Hill as I do, you see a lot of people who love to party, and in amongst their ranks are many whose partying has taken them beyond the lot of the hung over into burnout. Some of the people who suffer in this fashion veer into treatment. The lucky ones do. Getting help is an option for which no excuse needs to be made. For anyone who seeks psychiatric attention, a number of choices exist.

The University of Colorado will match you to a resident psychiatrist for a price. Many residents do some of their best work during their practice days, and the University has grown up a bit since the days when they insisted on Freudian interpretation. The ready availability of the University’s hospital is a plus when it comes time for that ordeal, the big “C” word: commitment. We can all agree that the hardest part of being a mental patient is the commitment.

For outpatient care on an ongoing basis, MHCD serves over 6500 adults and children. MHCD does not, no matter what disgruntled wags may say, stand for Malevolent Hostile Circle of Destruction, but, rather, the Mental Health Corporation of Denver. Founded in 1989, it represents the consolidation of all the City and County clinics that existed at that point. MHCD has eight clinics, and 40 residential facilities including group homes, apartments and assisted living for those with…head stuff.

MHCD recently won two awards, one of which was as the community provider of the year by the National Council for Community Behavioral Health Care. The other was the Martin Luther King Jr. award for Social Responsibility. The caseload of MHCD workers is weighty, what with the demands placed on them by cuts in state and Federal budgets in Medicare and Medicaid. Sometimes the caseworkers are young and overworked, and, as it is with any large agency, some people fall through the cracks. But for the most part, MHCD clients express satisfaction, even those who go to the Wishing Well just to wish they were well.

Karis Community is a miracle for those with serious and persistent mental illness. Located on Detroit Street, Karis takes selected clients to refurbish them with living skills. Located in a rambling building which once served as a convent, Karis offers a revolutionary program and achieves remarkable results.

The Capitol Hill Action and Recreation Group (CHARG) stands out as a truly inspired approach to the treatment of head stuff. With a clientele of less than 50, CHARG is small enough to pay personal attention to all of its clients. Many of the professional staff of CHARG came from the old Boardwalk community, along with a philosophy of empowerment. Like Karis, CHARG is dedicated to elevating its consumers into a full expression of living. With a drop-in center as well as another freestanding administrative office on Capitol Hill, CHARG has earned a sterling reputation as a champion of human rights.

So, if you have been paying a private professional every week for a dubious agenda that asks only what you think about your private professional, one of these agencies might have something to offer you, especially when it comes to an experience of community. We are all in this together. Isolation only exacerbates head stuff. Having a special place to share the experience of the strangeness we all feel from time to time makes for comfort. People reaching out to people makes for a better world, one where trust can happen.

 

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Deva Station

By Freddy Bosco

Before I met her, I was good
Enough for myself. Happy to be
Just me, set loose carefree,
A soul idly floating in a dream
Of dragonwings. Blue and green
Paper glued in a design on my wall
Gave me an afternoon’s ecstacy.
I would have an odd beer, nothing
To set off alarms. Further, further,
On down the road after dances
Of crafty romance and dalliances,
She came to me by the moon
Lusty and dark, lit, she seemed
From within. I was ripe for harvest.
Never before or since have I held
Any other with such yearning
As we scotched our way to hell.
Gone she is but she left her mark
Cut deep in me where she visits me
Every desperate week in dreams
That haunt me like the vampire’s touch,
Forever wanting, never to be had.

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December Nights

Celebrating The Nights Of December

By Freddy Bosco

In the deepest darkness, we go forth in the shortest days of the year: bundled and hunkered down. Snow comes to enshroud us at this time and we shiver as much from the cold as from astonishment at the stellar display in the midheavens: the stars!

We get treated this month to a sparkling assortment of customs, all ignited surely by the depth of our December nights, when we burrow under blankets, dreaming in peaceful warmth. Our night’s prayer thanks the source of our comforts and blessings, distributed as they are, widely these nights where war-torn earth sighs for relief.

The pain of ignorance scatters misery over our ravaged planet, even as we sleep, and we hasten to find the simple joys that deliver us whole to this precise moment just to know we can rejoice that we are alive!

While our feelings of mercantile obligation cloud our consciousness at this time, stretching our nerves and budgets on a stressful and painful rack of torture, we have at our reach a chance to feel something glorious. It has nothing to do with lists of objects to purchase, but instead, it is the longing of our hearts for the glory of the light and peace.

Long, long ago, there must have been an observation by an early humanoid that the sun was coming back, and that the longer and longer nights were giving way to more brightness. The promise of warmth and, with it, a chance to return from hibernation gave our ancestors reason to dance!

The celebration of these nights, when we gather and do little dances of social expectation with each other derive in part from the return of the sun. Were it a bit closer, we’d fry. A bit farther, we’d freeze. We have the good fortune to be whom and where we are, with light emanating from within each of us as surely as it shines down upon us.

Some of us have the bountiful good fortune to recognize the fact that the light and the peace we seek lies within. Nothing outside of us—not even political remedies—will ever give us the serenity we seek so desperately. There are those who make a lifetime of searching and questioning. Even when it has been shown so many times by so many of those who’ve been sent to reveal the truth, the quest continues.

The Bible says, “The kingdom of heaven is within.” And my own teacher has said many times that if he were to write a book, it would say nothing more than, “That which you are looking for is found within you.” I stand and watch myself scrambling over the landscape trying to buy the things I think will make myself and others happy, just as everyone else does, especially at this time of year.

In December, as at all times, let us give freely of the only thing we really have to give. To the best of my understanding is the reality of the fact that we have nothing to give, nothing but the love that resides within us, which we can know only by honoring the call of our hearts to go within, where we find that priceless light.

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Blessed

I figure that I am
A fortunate person, because
Of what I got and what
I didn’t get. There are
Wonderful things I got
And horrible things
I didn’t get. So far, I am
Breezing, sailing along
In near-oblivion to the grace
That surrounds me, and all
The gifts I could recognize
And accept if I were truly
Conscious and grateful.
Carrying my home within,
I can go anywhere, certain
That however long my time,
I can be joyous every day,
Smiled upon and blessed
With unfathomable love.

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Escape From Bellevue
By Freddy Bosco

The psychiatrist they assigned me to was named Jenks. Rhymed with “jinx,” and boy, did she ever live up to that assessment of my luck in that hospitalization. For those who haven’t spent much time in New York, let me explain that Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital was, at the time when I was committed there, a huge dirty snakepit.

Highly overmedicated patients in ragged pajamas roamed the halls hour after miserable hour waiting for lunch or dinner or bedtime. Bad as Bellevue was, we all lived in fear of getting shipped off from there to Manhattan State, a facility where the desperately Hopeless cases were sent. In Bellevue, we at least had a good ratio of patients to staff, so that assaultive behavior got noticed and addressed right away.

I had gone to Bellevue a year earlier for a week during my first official nervous breakdown. On my second visit, I had been taken there directly from my job by the police. I was in handcuffs which went well with my three-piece suit and Brooks Brothers tie. The officers had decided I was a Risk, so they saw to it that my hands were tied.

After refusing to say anything to anyone once the cuffs went on, other than to tell the nurse at Bellevue that drugs were against my religion, the staff decided I needed an immediate injection of Thorazine. After tranquilizing me, they stripped me and put me in pajamas, then onto a gurney which they put on an elevator to take me to My New Home.

For a horrible month, I struggled to make Dr. Jenks understand why I had been living the way I had been living before I flipped at my job. At one point, the staff decided to let me have my suit back. One morning, I was called in to see The Jinx in her office. My girlfriend was in the office, and something about seeing her triggered me.

I stormed out of The Jinx’s office. I walked down the hall and saw that the front door was open, because a janitor was scrubbing the floor, down on his hands and knees. He evidently thought I was not a patient, because he smiled and excused himself to move aside to let me out the door.
In my delusion, I decided that everything had been set up to let me get out of the place. I thought I was supposed to leave.

Out on 29th Street, the first thing I did was throw the artichoke my girlfriend had given me over the tall fence onto the lawn. I was convinced that it held at the very least a homing device. I did not want to have my location known. I really had no idea what to do next, so, of course, I went to a bar, looking for a woman I’d met who worked there.

She was not there, so I made my way back to my job. Back to the scene of the crime. I had no idea what else to do. I went into the office of the company president and, not finding him in, sat down at his desk and put all my money onto his desk. I began to count my money but was interrupted by the arrival of the police. My escape thwarted, I was shipped back downtown, in a screaming ambulance, my escape from Bellevue nipped in the bud.

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BATTLING DESPAIR

By Freddy Bosco

When I let my faith go and give in
To the fangs of my mind’s intent
On savaging my happiness, I suffer
Terribly, finding myself locked up
In darkness, and I hear only wicked
Laughter. Packaged thus in pain,
I consider drastic measures: goodbye
To life, but! There is one still small
Voice, faint but true which urges me
To trust. The fact that I have survived
Thus far proves to me that trusting
Has never seen me wrong. Self-pity
Is the favorite tool of the Worry Maker,
Located between my ears, who barks
Condemnation, shaming me for having
Done things it suggested to me earlier.
The gap between the twin perfections
We come from and go to leaves me
Open to everything life can deal me,
And in my vulnerability I can grow,
Even though growing so often comes
At the expense of artificial comfort.