The brain bully never tires of the tease,
Never stops with the what ifs, the possibles, the maybes.
But you could have, you might have, it always says to me.
This is the riddle of a mind with severe OCD.
Modal verbs proliferate and I feel subdued,
Head is struggling with that one dreaded mood.
The piranhas of punctuation have sheared my dreams to the bone,
Have left me battling with a disorder all on my own.
Thoughts are Hydras, cut their heads off and they grow,
You could have, you might have, you’ll never really know.
The sentences meander around the same old ground,
Snaking through logic without making a sound.
There are days when you feel as though you might be cursed,
No hour goes by without thinking the worst.
Days blur into each other, there is no definition,
No sane lines of thinking, no reasonable cognition.
You just repeat and repeat, then repeat some more,
Then it’s back to the beginning just as before.
The brain lock is punishing, there is never any key,
This is the plight of a mind with severe OCD.
The answers are illusions dressed up as fact,
You suffer all the more if you dare to react.
But imagination runs wild with no rest or restraint
It is a horrible, nasty, unenviable complaint.
To fight every day for your own sanity,
This is the lot of a mind with severe OCD.
By Sarah Mills