The SRC Sharing Gallery

The Sharing Gallery is a place for Larimer County residents who have been impacted by depression or bipolar disorder to share poems, stories and pictures that reflect their experiences. Submissions are posted for a limited period of time to allow space for others to share.

If you live in Larimer County and would like to submit a picture, poem, or story for our Sharing Gallery, please e-mail it to info@SuicideResourceCenter.org (please put Sharing Gallery in the subject heading) or mail it to 315 E.7 th St, Loveland, CO 80537. We reserve the right to screen for and refuse inappropriate material.

The Mire of Mistakes
Non-Ascendance
Recovery

Dark Days
Bipolar Bear
Identity

The Mire of Mistakes
Painting by MacKenzie Kelly
Poem by Michael Bennett Smith

(I've been there many times
And probably will return...
This place where I still visit
By taking some wrong turns...
It seems to be a human thing
Is what I have discerned...
And something to forgive
This humbled heart has learned...)

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Non-Ascendance
by David Gines

It is in
That one crack of lightening, that the world
Falls down, and I am overwhelmed by
Their Sadness. A pointed river,
Endless in rushing, &
Reaching away.

I carved it out in a day - the infinite space between
The one and the other. One
Looking, the other away.
Snatched. Split.
The infinite reaching and rushing away.
I measured it in sums and totals,
In grams and money, this everything,
But came
Up short of the infinite.

And when it rained I howled at the moon like the mother of all dogs.
This understanding with sadness, this
Line between now and never, an entire
Universe inside.

This is the needle that passes through the whole
Of humanity. This is the drip in your vein.
And these are the ones who charge the air
With bitterness and hope.
Left dangling on a stick, reaching,
When the world falls down, and life's river
Is left
Burning in the sky.

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Recovery
by Shawn Barrientos

Today I forgot to bleed for them.
To faithfully grind the tyrannical cud of the guilty mind.

Black hood of slaving memory
faithfully hand-stitched,
Perfectly fitted.
To skin.
To sinew.
To bone.
Nailed.
Just enough to feign permanence.

It must be removed.
No,
replaced.

It rips the skin.
Stings like lemonade in brail

Jagged pieces hang,
to be chipped away with desert wind.

But you can see my smile.
Alive
shining
Speaking

The rusty, dulled axe dropped,
along with the hand.

I have another one.
It will grow stronger.

Daily thought sieges are pain in a hot sticky jar.

To find the mind behind the heart, to spite the pain,
is standing naked on a bridge to Eden.

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Dark Days
by Michael Smith

There are days
when I pray for the spirit of hope
and that somehow
I will feel the light and the warmth
of its existence.
For there are many times
when darkness prevails
and life is but an hour to hour
spiritual struggle to survive,
as faith begins to grow cold,
and love seems lost,
and grace
is no longer recognized.

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Life
by Shawn Barrientos

1. Laughing

Pyrolyzing broken bridges,
It's what we think we do.
Instead, we benumb the creaky, speaking boards
To make slick
To make fall
To cleave the sallow spine
Or better yet,
Attack the wretched, mousy heart.

All so we can laugh.

The laugh after the switchblade phone call.

The, "It's funny because it's not me" laugh.

It always makes us smile.

2. Crying

People leave.
The curse of excretive womb.
An uninebriated fact.

No hate.
No love.

Only fallow trinkets
Of deep excavations of nail-to-back
And
Pseudo-sacred columns of secrecy.

I take from your life,
In return I consign a little death.
You leave,
I cry,
Fair trade.

3. Love

I think I've said enough.

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