Asylum.

Losing my mind was like swallowing hot coals—it stole the words from off my tongue. A treason like no other, even though we anticipate that it will burn. Embers lit up my mouth from the inside, like walls of a cavern lit entirely by torch. 

When my brain malfunctioned, my grasp on reality suddenly became loose. Unraveling like serotonin silly string until all that remained was one big knot. As my sanity escapes, all that was left is a pile on the floor of mess. 

I lose track of time as I obsess about an idea that evolves into branches that make up a nest. Twigs of delusion turn into entire trees when subjected to neglect. Dopamine twice a day does nothing to improve my self-respect.

I search the seafloor for something familiar to swim alongside with, making my way upstream until I can tell fish apart from their tailfins. Saved crocodile tears in a sandcastle—oysters reveal pearls of oxytocin alabaster.
It is finding yourself in quicksand sinking faster than a shotgun romance. A pair of rusting lock and key attached to some bridge in Prozac, France.

The metallic taste of mania often enlists the assistance of anxiety, especially when steel-spangled spices offer little in the way of variety. Pepper was better than ever back when salt was still secret, my pulse becomes a clock who only measures what's too soon to be revealed yet. Ticking thyme listens as time talks of things it wishes it had done. 

One arm's uneven the other's at odds, this unstable season's unreasonably hot. Going crazy was easier once I'd been driven there before, who said mental illness always left a suicide note scratched into stubborn cellar doors. 

On my way back to the real world, silence was the only schoolmate I knew I could trust, for even when she was pin drop quiet, her heart still sighed the heaviest. This Bipolar beauty was wickedly brilliant in battling her own serpentine uncertainty, hissing wildly as she slithered back to a sense of reptilian sobriety.