They say it’s an illness, not a war,
but I remember those nights—my small command,
a fist of muscle curled tight around the cold steel
of a golf club, waiting for her shadow
to crawl under the door, or worse—fill the room.

My grandma laughed in pieces, her voice breaking
into sharp edges, a tide I learned to feel before it broke.
She was beautiful once, my mother said,
an away we go girl, swaying on TV screens,
hips beating time like a metronome. But in that condo,
the beat was broken, off-kilter.

The Greeks thought the mind sat just above the lungs,
that fear could be trapped under the ribs like a dark breath.
And maybe it does start there—maybe phren was right—
because I feel it, the knot of us coiled in my chest, bound
like sinew and impossible to cough up.

When my mother whispered, that was a demon, not her,
I felt the word press itself into the air, something more real
than exorcism, more desperate than prayer, a way to fold
the impossible into sense. And I believed her.

Do you want me to lick your pussy, Karen? Grandma’s voice,
a dangerous purr stretching through the hall. Mom turned to me,
her face twisted in apology—that was a demon, she said,
as if a name could burn the sickness out, as if sheer will
could make the poison leave.

Schizophrenia, they say, isn’t a split, not in the way we thought—
it’s a splintering, the mind tearing like fabric, every thought
fraying, threads pulled out, tangled, until nothing holds.
I learned this early: that it’s not demons or voices,
but a raveling mess, as if sense itself has become violent.

The Greeks got it wrong—phren was never enough.
What they called split, we call bloodline. What I call prayer
is pressing my ear to the wall, listening for the refrain
of my own voice, praying it sounds like me.

---