Your fingers bruise your rosary with mad devotion.

When you first came to America, your loneliness swelling high above the bus station, up where the angels lay, you built your makeshift apocalyptic nest, pulling in the cheapest Jersey Gods that flew around, storm after storm in that neon grim city.

Now, you are losing it they say, paranoid delusions of soldiers breaking into your house, hiding your car from the police, clutching the hot vein of your cell phone as you drive your mother in her conical straw hat across the bumpy Vermont fields, staring out from her yolky Alzheimer’s haze as the car lurches over the mud and leaves. I tell them to let you be, let you suckle on the story that heals, even if it’s one they don’t approve. 

No one can weave as fiercely as you. You who never should have been exiled from Burma. You afraid to leave your apartment now, the isolation you say now suits you. You, in your tattered white bathrobe, gray roots frosting your scalp, peeking out from curtains, to see who might be there, like a spider sensing its web, pricked, wrapping each social worker in the pure white gauze and clouds of Jesus’ paradise, as they look at you and speak to you of maintaining healthy boundaries with the tenderness reserved for an infant or a dog. 

Once, you recalled for them the steamy jungles of your birth, the hell of your flight, where you ran and ran through the night and woke to a python wrapped around a tree, your father hacking its head off, prying its 17-foot long body off the trunk. It took so long for it to die, uncoil enough so you could feast on the eggs lined up like potatoes in its womb.

Though you tell them you are well, that reincarnation landed you with Jesus, they say you are in denial, (a form of death, a blindness), talk to you of the dangers of psychophobia, show you a cartoon called “My Ego”—What you really want to speak of is angels, the holy spirit, wings, dappled light, the latest issue of The Watchtower.

For now, who is to say what stories suffocate, or heal, which ones work or fall flat, comfort us in the dark?  The X-rays of your brain, with their gullies and black caves, may or may not save you. The ones they hurl to you for rescue, can still let whole vats of plump suffering slide through their nets, as the white coats proudly drag you on to shore.

Oh the brilliance of your story they say is covering up the real story. Don’t let them belittle it, as you coax yourself home each night with the angels that calm you. Who is to say what holds you intact as you’re hurled through space, landing with a thump into the great American refugee hive, and begin this frantic human work, perpetual manic revival, stretching your way through the half-light of this vast unraveling strangeness?