OCD, metaphor, and me: the horse that can’t eat apples

I expect most people haven’t heard the one about the horse that can’t eat apples. It's not a joke; it's a poem, one I wrote in the spring of 2016, when my mental health was spinning out of control. The poem was the first of what became a poetry collection, The Thoughts, which explores intrusive thoughts as part of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I hadn’t planned to write so much. With the work recently published, I now find myself reflecting on how poetry provided such capaciousness and versatility.