Help save the mentally healthy!
Spare some change for the non-deranged bluffers
neatly arranged and suffering under
the smothering weight of their
strange mediocrity,
oblivious to danger
in their earplugged hypocrisy
and their boring office shoes and shirts,
ignoring obviously bruised and hurt hearts because
society told them to, because
propriety rolled them into
blinkered balls of “I’m safe here
behind the bunker walls where I can’t taste fear
behind my mortgage and career
and one point six children
where everything’s peachy.”
Help save the mentally healthy
with their preachy
advice
about how we should just be nice
to ice-hearted shysters whom we loved
and who sliced us
into cut-price fudge without thinking twice,
how we shouldn’t bear a grudge
against those who won’t budge
from judging us to be lower than sludge because we
stand up for ourselves,
because we slash back with passion and anger
and don’t slouch in languor under servile spells.
Help save the mentally healthy
with their indifferent inability to consider
why some people’s spirits
lie in millions of bits
and some people’s pints of bitterness are spilling
because instead
they’ve got an income tax form to fill in,
which is a genuine problem.
Help save the mentally healthy
with their failures to see
that there’s only plenty of fish in the sea
if you swim with the tide
and the twenty thousand other trout
all spouting their self-deluded
quickly-concluded
never-doubting notions
that the earth is a surfable ocean
of perfectly straightforward
ordered
order
like “Everything that’s distorted in the world
is because of someone with a pale-coloured nob,
so shut your privileged gob”,
or “Of course Nine-Eleven wasn’t an inside job
you intellectual slob, don’t submit
to the mob of crackpot nut-jobs,
our governments are here to protect us
and they respect us, obviously, because
blah blah blah democracy blah blah blah,
there’s never more than meets the eye,”
always full of answers
but empty of questions
like “Why?”
Help save the mentally healthy
with their repetitive obsessive objectives
to fit in,
by hook or by crook
to fit into the narrowest nook
and do
everything
by the book.
And the book says
Mentally Healthy Personality Disorder, or MHPD, is a delusional mental illness affecting around eighty-five per cent of the general population. The list of criteria that must be met for diagnosis, as outlined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is as follows:
One. An exaggerated sense of one’s own normality, well-adjustment and propriety.
Two. Black and white thinking and a belief in simple solutions to complex problems.
Three. The substitution of actually helping or listening to or caring about people with the use of phrases such as “Just get over it” and “Just pull yourself together” and “Just do what everybody else does”.
Four. A complete inability to comprehend intense passionate emotion, or greatness, or destiny, or alienation, or disaster.
Five. A complete inability and unwillingness to think outside the narrow confines of what society finds acceptable and follow one’s human intuition and nature.
Help save the mentally healthy!
Just six pounds a month
can buy a bunch of egg-whisks
for them to thump themselves over the head with
to help them see the misty futility of life,
that comes as part of a Swiss Navy utility knife
they can plunge and twist into their heart
to remind them that it exists.
