Tag: poetry

Thoughts as I Approach Fifty part 2

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I have an unusual life situation. 

I’m 49 years old and live in a council flat in north London. I held down jobs when I was young but have not worked since the age of 25. I have a long record of mental illness and have been admitted to psychiatric wards in the past. 

Since the age of 31 I’ve been trying to learn how to write poetry. After floundering initially, the standard of my writing has improved dramatically. I’m now happy with the quality of my stuff and am confident enough to approach publishers. A couple of my poems have been published in local magazines for the Somers Town area where I live. I’ve read at poetry events a handful of times. I plan to enter the Poetry London Pamphlet Competition soon with a short collection of short poems I’ve put together. I’ll see how it does.  

I exist in an odd niche in society. Diagnosed with a very serious mental condition I receive quite generous benefits. Sometimes people with more conventional life paths resent people like me for getting paid for not doing anything. Although often it seems they are more than happy to pour scorn on the mentally ill. I’ve been in hospitals, day hospitals, day centres, the back of ambulances and just wandered around living on moonbeams and miracles at different times and in different contexts. 

The interior of my flat once looked like the inside of a skip. Now it looks halfway decent. I manage to feed and clothe and keep myself washed almost totally consistently these days. I have some brilliant friends and a supportive family. Not everything is bad. Some things in life are very bad. Nasty arguments and confusing situations from the past go around in my head almost non-stop. It can become so intense I start shouting and hitting myself. I can become chronically depressed and have restless nights. I am under the care of my local community mental health team. 

I feel like the way I’ve re-established self-care routines and am gradually sorting out my living space could be a base to build from. I could make advances in other areas and start making a life I want to live in. The bad feelings I have locked inside me can make me despair. I sometimes fear that things won’t get better in any real way. That I’ll be perpetually stuck, misunderstood and misrepresented. In the past I just kept going out of sheer bloody mindedness. A two-finger salute to people who tried to drag me down when I was young. Maybe the way I’ve built up a competency in creative writing could be the beginning of a vocation. People will see who I am and I can leave something good behind me which marked my existence. 

More to come… 

The Awakening

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I came across this poem at a community event in Somers Town. I'd never heard of the poet or the poem before but it really struck me. The organizer of the event (Sylvi Temple) kindly emailed a photo of it to me. 

The event was a unique combination of poetry and gardening held in the forecourt of a block of flats near the British Library. It was a celebration on the Islamic festival Ead and an ushering in of spring after a long winter. We took it in turns to read out segments of poems and songs by people as disparate as Joni Mitchell and Rumi. I also read two of my poems. Sylvi introduced William Wantling as a veteran of the Korean War. A poet little known even in his native United States. The poem slowly unfolded under blue sky and sun among an eclectic bunch of Somers Town residents. 

The image of the wounded bee as it sat in the speaker’s hand; its “dumb drive” to survive was burned into my imagination. He talks about a “dumb brute thing that had occurred” paralyzing the bee. It reminded him of wounded comrades in Korea and their blind drive to fight on. 

My friend Alice Woolf sometimes uses the analogy of a fly trapped in a web to describe her and my situations. She has struggled with the debilitating effects of severe ME and depression for many years. The stuckness I experience in my own illness is similar to hers. She talks about the fly struggling to break free then becoming exhausted, rallying, fighting again and then becoming exhausted again. I have experienced a mental block for time out of mind. 

In the rough, unpretentious language of the poem it is as if the little creature’s suffering is drawn up into the consciousness of the man. He then reflects on it, becomes angry, “unreasoned...extravagant”. He harshly commands the bee to “STOP THAT!” When the bee ceases to struggle against its horrible fate, it becomes “marvellously whole” and flies away. The appalling, overwhelming “Awakening” referred to in the title. 

It made me think that in the knowledge of one’s own “unfair conflict” of heart and mind, there could be a kind of awakening. From the speaker’s own inner anguish comes an unexpected and quiet grace. In the poem the man becomes a kind of god. Comprehending the bee’s torment as no one else does then blasting a lightning bolt of truth out of the sky. It’s a combination of compassion and power that leaves him humbled and astonished.

Let World Chaser Have It (part 1)

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I was walking down a street in Somers Town on a Friday night. A pub was overflowing with people enjoying the evening. Suits, students, builders, bar staff. The music and the bustle spilled out onto the road, voices cascading into warm air. I near-by Indian restaurant was booked-up. A lively hubbub escaping was from the open doors and the chairs and tables lining the front of this establishment. The same was true of an Italian place on the other side of the street. Behind me Euston Road was flowing with traffic. Mercs, Beamers. Porsches with music blaring out of their windows. The pedal-rickshaws were doing a good trade. Their disco lights flashing and their boom boxes blasting Abba into the ether. The whole world was having a good time. 

The headlights of a car pulling into Chalton Street crossed my path to the local mini mart. Brightness threw my shadow across the wall and lit up some graffiti on the side of a wheely bin. Smeared in black aerosol; “Let World Chaser Have It”. 

In the old life I used to do the 9–to-5. Trudging backward and forward between a diamond sorting office in Hatton Garden and a council flat near Euston Station. Over five years money slowly built up in the bank. I was exhausted, berated and hassled. I was passed over for promotion, but I held the job down. I’d also undertaken a study of philosophy at night school. Although I was near the bottom of the pyramid, I’d never been this financially secure and my credit rating was excellent. I dreamed of a life beyond the one I had. Climbing a mountain into a dreamed-of world. 

In the middle part of my twenties, I had a bad mental breakdown. At the lowest ebb of my illness, I’d stopped washing and eating. I wasn’t attending to the most basic things in my life. I weighed seven stone, I stank, my flat looked like a bombsite. All the money I’d built up in the bank had gone. 

I was admitted to a psychiatric ward for the first time at the age of 28. Over the next few years, I was admitted to hospitals and day centres several times. In one horrible incident I was sectioned to be detained and medicated against my will. I was given a diagnosis which was anathema to me. I felt completely lost in the world and misunderstood on all levels. 

I’m now well into my forties. Things have improved in my life in many but I’m still not back to where I wanted to be. My clothes are always clean and I’m well-kempt these days. My flat is just moderately untidy. I eat three times a day. I am a normal weight for my height. After years of living in a shambles, I’m beginning to put my financial life back together. I haven’t worked since my twenties and receive disability benefits from the DWP. 

I still engage with the world around me. I have friends and people who say hello to me. I have a supportive family who live up in Yorkshire. I’ve developed my interests in photography and poetry slowly but surely, although my budding musicianship has ceased. The way the digital revolution has democratised things for people like photographers, musos and filmmakers has fallen into my lap. My collection of CDs got damaged through the bad times. Now I stream music online. Through social media and my blog people can see who I am. Not everything is bad. 

I feel like someone fast-forwarded my life and dumped me in Bladerunner. They tell you to cultivate gratitude for good things you have and there are some. I’m trying to look forward from a troubled past to a brave new world that could exist in the future...

Dusky Ink

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Dusky Ink 

A little heater with its electric glow: 
it sits in the shadow, it means home. 
Back at my flat; top slot of the lift. 
Dusty designs in a ramshackle drift. 
 
There’s no wine, just cheap cigarettes. 
Smoke makes ghosts cos I can’t forget. 
Cans might clink if I drink as I think. 
A moon-edged sky; the window’s brink. 
 
Skeleton towers on her diesel breeze. 
The city’s sea shifts softly, uneasily. 
The sun inscribes with a dusky ink, 
so sirens rise high as he sadly sinks.

Dan (for Daniel Marchbank)

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Dan
(for Daniel Marchbank)

You said you liked watching the rain 
running down your window. 
You can’t see why people complain. 
The movies flickered on your screen 
 
in cinematic dreams. You knew all the directors, 
like you knew all the bands. Oasis 
to the Chilli Peppers to the Wu-Tang Clan. 
I used to come round to drink cups of decaf. 
 
We swapped cigarettes, shrugged off regrets, 
had a laugh. We talked about the days 
when you partied in a haze. Clubbed it up 
‘til you went off the rails. The lows and the highs. 
 
The good times and the fails. 
You had a warm heart but you played it cool. 
You had a smile for your friends, no time for fools. 
Ray-Bans hid the sadness in your eyes 
 
the heavy melancholy, the turmoil in your life. 
I wish I could come around and see you now. 
Under electric light, the clouds unloading down. 
Watch the rain from the panes of Somerton House. 
 
That sad morning it all got too much. 
I miss big Dan with his human touch. 
With his reason and his rhymes and the love inside. 
You’d still be here if you didn’t take that dive. 
 
I recall that song you put on, Bat for Lashes: 
“Daniel, when I first saw you, 
I knew that you had a flame in heart” 
At your church service friends and neighbours 
 
lit candles for you. For the memories of Dan 
and the light that flickered in his heart.

Fat Bum Song (for Dylan Grundy)

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Fat Bum Song
(for Dylan Grundy) 

He’s always on the lookout for those 
fat bum chicks. 

He reckons Eve had a fat bum, 
Eve who was tempted by the serpent. 

Her fat-bummed daughters 
swarm the streets of London in the summertime. 

There’s so many they should be given away free, 
a fat bum for you, a fat bum for me. 

He wants to get a T-shirt saying 
“I’m the monk who likes fat bums.” 

Although he isn’t actually a monk, 
just a Christian who studies the teachings of The Buddha. 

He looks like a cheeky little Buddha sitting there. 
A cheeky little Buddha smoking a Marlboro Red. 

A Saint Jude pendant 
hanging round his neck.