’Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.’
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, 1845
The hard-earned determination of Frederick Douglass to learn to read and write fuelled his literary outpouring of the horrors of slavery with a far greater intensity than his glimpse of hope of freedom. But raw words carried their truth far beyond their source, revealed and helped end that inhumanity..
Windows into inner worlds
My compulsive journals recorded events of my new life, colourful, precarious, reflective and voluminous, while my poems traced a narrow arc, rising from newbie in London, in Paris, hopeful, romantic, slipping to breaking in body and mind to despair, and beyond by miraculous turns to resilience, hope, and on, on into the predatory jungle which 21st century Britain became for those without protection. Brutal profit and power hunger circling my pain-wracked body, drenched me in a new kind of paralysing dread, trapped within calculating pack-animal deceit:
‘Only psychos act alone, bullies need a gang’. Gangs need victims, to vent frustrations, boost egos, status-smirks or bank accounts. Despite multitudes of kind sound people, we reached a new era of overlords and underlings. I tasted another kind of suffering, billions have known, and millions still endure… human inhumanity taught me intense empathy: a profound awareness of others.
I’m not a poet. I scribble lines which arrive at odd moments of intensity; I can be driven from the bath, or to turn on a light at night to grab pen and paper to snatch thoughts, words that grasp at a feeling, even a truth. This thin arc rose, fell, plateaued, dipped, meshed with the vast world of injustice to others whose inner and outer screams are silenced. I learned to feel for them. I had always detested injustice, suffering it too deep beyond endurance wrung a visceral intensity.
In 2020 greed and profit hunger circled me again, triggering that same gut-wrenching drenching dread which peaked one night in cascading thoughts - of humans, back through time, ongoing to the present, to Grenfell Tower, the pinnacle of crass uncaring othering, state sanctioned. No law, no redress for a conflagration of terror, agonising loss beyond imagination - though not beyond comprehension of cause, in this profit-fuelled, heartless limitless backsliding. Grenfell - onetime green field - so close to home - turned on the bedside light, grabbed notebook and a pen…
……………………………………………………….
Old Nick the Younger
See how he spins, a cock
atop the steeple steeped in their
sufferings labour-layered brick
upon brick, the unseen people
means to elevation. Watch his turns,
prevailing breeze backslaps and
under-puffs, his crimson comb
aloft windblown and crafted
beak mid crow can’t peck
or speak his tune. Yet
status-perched insentient appeal
calls mindless trailings scatterings
to circles close below.
Sharp suited trained in crafts of
broiler house, those public private
places, palaces, damn buster-boys
amok fag-fagging through the years
of rank esteem submission-drained
drown out their own, held captive
in forced labour. Mind-bending
trick-tack tactics lowest grasp
of humankind unkind destructive
crags beneath benign and
smoothly shallow waves.
See sense? We’ll wear their outer layers
first and fast then wear away
at any inbred nature nurture given
- kindness? It’s for losers
here it’s win win win while Daddy
pays his hard spun fees - hard
is the word the aim the game
to gaining coveting
first class degrees
in diktat Domination.
I see them daily, bluebirds rising
uniform in cardboard cutout wings
and tiny beaks all uninformed in flying
stuck with pretty clouds and mocked-up
trees collaged in kindergarten,
hear their choral twitterings
incessant calling cheap cheap cheap
around the stacked-up buildings.
Twin Towers? No no
not this time. Others know
their cause, the fierce slow burning
smouldering raging fuses
leading driving into blinding
conflagration. Despotic acts
of desperate damaged minds
easier by miles of years
to comprehend than envy greed
don’t give a damn cremation.
When Tallys penned his choral gems
while weaving this way that way
with the winds of crass discriminating
detail of a cut of this or that new
flavour of the decade dark dominion,
living burnings axe and rack -
you think it was another age? Oh no.
Think of it this way, short sure steps
of generations. Great-friend Sally breathed
her final mornings evenings after Armageddon
blazed spring-summer three years back,
her grandad breathed his first in 1844,
great grandad 1793, that time
when Terror reigned across the sea, heads
rained from blade sharp fingers.
You think we’ve changed? Encircled
thoughts are not your own.
Group-think can make a virtue of
barbarities, pour pitch on purity
barbed tongues of venom spit
the doublespeak of vipers. Times
gone are not so far. Great grandad
of passed-friend’s great grandad
takes the back-step to the end-times
of the Tudors. Burn or slash for this
or that, the game of numbers,
grab a title, vice will do today
then bring the madman in together
with the weakling and the devious.
Why stop at two when three
can do much more, while vicedom
draws your lead four makes a gang
rag-tag but common cultures
need no guns.
The brave, the older and the young
spoke truth to power, defied
the agonies, screams of their dislocation
silenced by stakes in burning. The brutes
beguiled by their belonging, by their
place in creeds of Justified in robes
emblems of trade, today besuited.
I lie unsleeping, four or five at dark
of night, the sound of heavy rhythmic
heaving waves more comforting
more true more close securing.
Your perch of bricks, your real estate
holds less endurance than the neighbour
sands, the undulations of this moment
of my hearing now, long heard before
back down the centuries unchanged
and onward into time, unyielding.
What is your dream? What part of nature -
wealth? What part of father’s plan?
Of group-think class-think minds’ deceiving?
These daytime night-time sounds of living
moments move into the far gone ranges
memories surpassing any man made
monument of heaped up stones,
more clear than all my girlhood dreams
of care, more potent now than any past-time
part time partner’s breathing.
Too many sufferings to bear within
without my inner outer screamings.
Do not mistake yourself for that greyed
suited man who infamous complained
they’re “getting me confused
with someone else
who gives
a dam…”
(sic)
11 December 2020
Underpass
I passed a woman crying
holding a man, part slumped
against the wall, his face
as if he’s dying,
seated,
concrete
cardboard
blue tarp flash.
The image came
framed
some steps beyond
their huddle.
Why?
Did I walk on by?
I am walking
wounded.
I see them
everywhere
below, above.
Some cuddle up
alone some
with a dog
for love
in their cold-time
hotspots.
Some game
the giving eye
some cap-in-hand
at lap or feet
some weep
Some die.
Tourists smile
snap
take away
their souvenir:
London
Westminster
April 30
2018.
I and my pain, my pain and I have
wound a lifetime where regret is useful as
a pebble in alluvial beds, too far too deep
for dredgers to perceive far less find purpose.
Pain is the one dependent, codependent,
could not live without me, and I would have
sought divorce - have tried - but this old
ne’er do well is welded to my side.
Together we have scoured the decades, ground
ten million griefs, I fought it like a student might
a tiresome teacher, mother might a husband run
to drink and useless everywhere his manhood
once held promise - in her mind -
yet without him she would not have borne
their child.
We have a child my pain and I, and when
the dawn or dusk has brought me ease –
enough - I’ll finger down the racks of years
in awe not anger, that I found no skill in me or
any outside hand could lift the yoke although
I knew, have always known it’s not beyond
the wit the will of modern man and woman
their machines electrified, but they were blind. Blinkered
by books by tracts and stayed their learning tracks
their college uni guides and journals peer-reviewed
my orphan syndrome clear as childhood, falsified,
labelled, libelled, ‘Thick File’.
My patient truth crushed by mistakes, by secret conscious lies,
my protests shredded with my nerves, ransacked
my body broken ever more by cruel degrees,
my spirit all but crucified. Yet through it all they could not
could not stop my mind or still my driven
frantic scratches markings scribbled screams
which now, have now, beyond an incubation longer
than Earth’s creatures’ norm, developed - maybe - into
some resemblance, semblance, reasoned - form.
My crushed full-breech long-suffered offspring, is delivered
- born.
6 February 2006
I cannot understand
who placed this paintbrush in my hand then
locked me in this little room alone.
I can’t remember anymore exactly what
I came here for. I feel I walked in freely
then someone shut the door… and there’s
something I’m supposed to do but what it was
or why it was, and how…
And everything’s so vague and hazy now.
I’ve got to try and travel it
take it all inside me, trace it down. If only
I could reach it all, run a racing finger
round the world from pole to pole
then wave my paintbrush like a magic wand
and with one stroke invoke the whole and state
‘That’s what I have to say!’
but fail in all my fumbling strokes to show.
Stumbling blindly, I can’t touch
or sense or feel.
I can’t relate or see around me
nothing’s real.
If only I were free
from that shadow, that reflection
that inflection of myself in liberation
like a hand upon my shoulder
holding me.
If only I could break away
then streak across the breathing world
and pour my spirit out the spendthrift way.
If only I had energy.
No-one has ever looked into my room, my
rotting cage, or seen behind my mildewed eyes
the silent stifled rage, growing more frenzied as
my power folds and fails.
Maybe I’ve been forgotten here.
Nothing can feed me now
only memories and dreams
all growing thin.
I feel so thin
locked in my pinched and nipped-in days
closed away, what can I see or know?
What can I feel, folded within this
limp and sickly body hanging round me like a shroud
that binds my arms and
sends me spinning round in dizzy waves
that bring me reeling down.
I’m on my knees, I must get out of here
I can’t go on. Please let me go.
I didn’t ask to be here, this is not where
I belong. Still there’s a voice that echoes all
day long, ‘You’ll stay until you finish it.
You know you can’t go home
until you’re done.’
But maybe one day I’ll become
as crazy as an overzealous sun, screaming
my way unbridled through each searing scorching
self-made savage day. Blazing outwards
burning up within, then shrivelling in my own
white haze and slowly shrinking down
till I’m so small I might just fade
without a trace, lost in another world among
the maze of space between the lines
that form the thumbprint of
Tom Thumb.
This way, perhaps I’ll know
the full experience between
the furthest two extremes
that I can go.
………………………….
I find no freedom now in Paris streets
only a rigid heat;
hope melts beneath the swollen sun
and drips with me along my blind retreat
gathering stagnant pools round frigid feet,
I can no longer run.
……………………………
I’ll wait the witching hour that slips between
eleven o’clock and three,
and drag my dreams between my knees to comfort me,
stirring a little with a wayward breeze that sometimes calls by night
and for a moment lifts my kite again.
What made me fall - ?
Into this wilderness of worn-out lives and wilted ways
and weary eyes that drift through drawn-out days
hollow and hungry, without appetite.
I know their pain.
We walk along in shrouds, ghosts without home,
so much the same, I never felt so much alone
haunting the truth that never reached me.
Those eyes that stare from stone will never blink
nor smile at me again.
…………………………..
This afternoon I went to Hell
I woke from sleep and thought I’d died;
found no remembrance, semblance, actuality
but all around me rimless grey rolled wide
and life swelled at my shoulder, crushing me,
a huge relentless presence pressing me outside
and there was nowhere I could turn or hide
and no way I could end the scream in me
except to fall, and close my eyes, and leave it all.
Then at the moment of the climax pain
a hand reached out, and drew me back again.
But how much more can I survive?
These churning nightmares burn so deep within.
If I’m alive and there’s still more
please let me fall asleep
and never wake until the world will take me in again.
…………………………
My early poems here are from the time I first lost hope in doctors, which took me into a ‘One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ world of people as mentally broken as I, who understood, medics who had no time to listen, and staff who varied from kind to indifferent, to cruel.
Simply put, my internal organs were displaced. At age five, major surgery revealed massive organ herniation - left in situ as it was not the tumour surgeons feared. This clear clue to tissue weakness was not considered in early adulthood when I began to experience perpetual intense pain and symptoms from internal pressure. My gut had stretched and collapsed onto my lower spine, but scans focus inside the gut for disease, not its location. Without disease, the standard label is IBS, then ‘psychosomatic’. Not being believed, being trapped in unseen agony, eroded my sense of self and broke my mind. Ending my life was not compulsion not choice, the only open door. A chance stranger saved me that ultimate day.
The Cuckoo’s Nest followed. Empathy between inmates, along with our tenuous friendships, began to lay my steppingstones out, but not to health or freedom. I was one of the luckier, not all survived.
Suffering creates empathy. By 2003 when I wrote the poem ‘Nothing is normal’, I was profoundly disabled and again at the brink of despair… with a driving need to express.
Nothing is normal now
nor ever was, in this perpetual dawn;
too little light to see more than the outline form
of the intended
and these creased limbs can’t ease without the sun
or break the walls hide-bounded.
I was a child when this began
a changeling. One step up from early learning
one step down from my full-grown beginning.
I could not sense the skin was sealed so strong
and I kept knocking, year on year, longing and hoping.
What happens to this world…
The sun gets stuck. Earth hesitates, the smooth rotation
shudders on its pin. It’s not just cruelty that kills,
it’s carelessness. Neglect. I’m sorry
I was busy. Must try harder next time.
Bad things I’ve done - .
I found a creature once, a small brown thing
with just an outline trace of wings-in-waiting.
Fascinating - for a school
for children and for teacher.
Placed it in a little plastic box
with a clear lid, so we could watch
when it broke free and flew. Then I forgot.
I found it - later.
Lovely tiny thing, soft velvet wings
leaf green, a fairy moth
composed and still.
Stifled, starved or both.
‘Natural wastage’ someone said.
The run-off at the edges.
There is an image jammed, replaying every hour today.
A woman, coffee brown, lifting her arm-stick
to her hollowed face, lying down in Africa
and crying - It’s too late for me -
but what of them - my children.
Heads bowed they sit and scuff the dust
too scared to look.
Nothing is normal now -
I was a child when this began -
The sun gets stuck -
It is too late for some
emerging moth
for all it had was life - a dream of flight
a little span
an inch or two, a month.
I’m sorry - .
I didn’t hear you knock - you were
too small, too soft - . I didn’t think enough.
So slim the chance
that flicks aside a life or feeds it
frees it.
The chance was to be here - at all - .
A chain of consequence, coincidence
the spark that fed ignition.
The safe-house - then - with expectation
in the cells of three score years and ten
to play the stage, the instrument, fine tune it
through inspiration - want - through fear,
cast out or casketed in gold five thousand years
the foetus and the pharaoh started equal.
The chance was to be born and to have tasted
some range of days and years - enough -
to love and procreate or procreate and love - or love -
that’s some achievement.
The mother sinks content - maybe - to know
her replication, too, will not lay wasted.
My fear was this that drove me
kept me feeding, breathing, living on my knees
a full half-life beneath my secret ceiling -
that starlight would snuff out the dawn
without the sun revealing.
Raising an arm-stick to my face, not known.
Sinking in the dusky orange globe
in some bald halfway hall
in London. In other rooms and worlds
strangers pontificate, debate a rag
of life round tables, phone lines.
Ticking a box - or not - .
Checking a watch. Snapping a day into
a briefcase folded. Closed.
We have given you our time -
levered a hairline as they all did
swept a glance inside
it looked quite normal.
Our desks are strewn, your case is toughened now
and tiring, long rolled to the corner.
It has all gone on too long.
Time grows a seal, the task
gets harder - heavier - speaks
of failure. Too much to take on
let on, let out now. Easier
to keep it closed, Pandora.
Time has long gone, when I saw medics
lined against the wall, mown down
or heaped on blazing bonfires. Some dark whiplash.
Just, unjust. Omnipotence knows no censure.
Experts - know-alls - nudge and wink
along the chain of title, old school tie.
Professors, judgements, could go down like ninepins
but they prop each other, mafia like or
Masons, singing softly, fingering footnotes,
palm to palm around their ring.
The wiser one applies his mind
and fixes all he can, then tries, discreet
to ease me past the blockage.
But the gentle man can’t hold the door
against the heel that slams it;
even Samaritans retire.
All along the years
the trace of truth that led me - still -
defied me. All through those folded days I’ve known
only an outside hand can free me.
Only the bold imagination can suppose
my ball and chain is hidden deep within me.
All along I tried,
strove from the inside without leverage.
Rose to the task each riven day, to coax
the creases, tease out some skein of ease
press my small force -
then heaved and pounded.
And I grew - wiser - but became
ever more wounded.
Under the heel
force slips, compressed
unfinished.
But it’s tedious now
this process.
I have wearied of the stake
the odds, the game
the half-lit days of hope
of my unfolding, undiminished
yet I lived - anyway.
It’s too late now, long gone
Earth can’t reverse
I can’t reclaim, return
the life that’s taken.
The fear was this that drove me
drove us all
of being caught in wrong rotations
- not for turning.
I’m tired of life.
Would you like mine?
A penny for your death.
Take this my twilight zone instead
I’ll take your emerald shroud and
exit now.
I reproduced myself, I’ll sink content.
My maiden flight has been suspended
all along, but yours was sealed too soon
and all you could be, ended.
Just one last thought - .
The plant, unwatered, drying, dying
by degrees, conserves its strength, shuts down
sheds all the fight, the show, the dressing
and excess. Draws in -
distills within its wasting form
its essence, then drives out, unfurls
its last late flag of worth, best effort now
- a tiny lovely leaf -
that’s some achievement.
25 November 2003
…………………………………..
If only I were well and strong and free
it isn’t you, my friend,
this isn’t me.
It’s not our fault it’s all so out of line -
I fear I feel
our cracked and crooked worlds
won’t heal or strengthen
to combine.
What are we doing here?
Holding each other, clutching, looking brave
trying to fill each other up
but we’re not touching still
there’s nothing there
or here -
we’re both concave.
………………………….
They wear an antonym these days with
lipstick and high heels or suits and shirts - blue collared.
Those baseball bats and bricks
that shattered bone are traded now for Microsoft
and endless pages of A4, plain portrait envelopes
shoot through your door first class blue franked
the messengers - transparent -
little windows bare your name, your home
glare out and dare you slip -
a finger - eye - your life - within.
Faceless names behind the missives, missiles
paid to play with words, tease out and twist
a phrase or two or twenty, batter your
truth and bat it, ever back.
Old games new hashed through
Business School, Management
Class.
Humans re-sourced, the chief
execs, customer
service (laugh) hold hoops
to leap through round and round
until the cowboys file and fold
their yearly circus down.
Decamp.
Budgets, annual - anal - bottom line -
the truth and lies are short-life schemes,
soon shredded in
The Time Machine.
………………………….
I used to be ‘so secretive’.
The two words scored - tramlined - my flesh
while I was tender - still. Later, in adulthood
the one word ‘circumspect’ - gifted my way with grace,
I wore it on a chain, next to my heart, for several seasons.
Then my discernment - left.
Now I detest my own distrust -
this tongue that won’t lie still, the fiddling
instrument of a fragmented - desiccated - mind…
My trammeled fingers drawn and burned by fires that warmed
like rising suns then scorched and spat me out on rocks
on some precarious cliff-edge, lodged above ravines
below the hanging rocks only uneven breath might dislocate
poised overhead to… fall.
My constancy - is fear - . I try to suck
some succour from the earth, the dust, try to feel faith
call every turn of daylight nightlight - gifts
and jabber jabber jabber all the while
to try to excommunicate the grief, scrabble for grip
and scribble scribble like some caveman
rock on rock my tools my canvas
and the ready dirt in all its varied hues,
dark slate and umber stained with tears
and sweat, my medium.
I am a wittering thing.
I hear the laughter float from winding lines of ants below where
valley sides are grassed. I watch them toil and eat and sleep
and sometimes dance in perfect circles always;
and I see more - maybe -
than they yet know - or can,
no mystic lights, no UFOs, just repetition,
sameness stamps the man.
Boredom, their fear.
Distractions like blue moons take
them in secret sometimes;
each then turns a little rarer
bluer… or small scuffles break
the weaker one knocked out
the big one flares
then tramps his tedious turnings.
Oh, they jeer to see me, just
another ant who could run
in their circles, stuck
and suffering here.
15 January 2006
…………………………
War weary now - how they sense it - stalking
the fear stroking the hairs ever on end
never-ending, the kick kick kicking in.
Defences are worn down close in the fold
of the old lapel,
my shield is as small as a Girl Guide’s
badge of honour
yellow as marked men, women,
children’s long buried stars.
How - was it
for them?
This is a small petty war, no-one
has died. No-one can hang me,
march my children away yet
the dread is a cruel force with each
dark deed an unseen noose tugs close
closer against my thin skin.
This scream is for you.
And you, all the uncounted countless
war-torn weary ones sent still
sent to your suffering end while the nice guy
sees strolls along, head up
having his happy day.
………………………………………
If I could cancel – Sleep
And flourish without Food,
And never host a Hunger Pang
Or ever harbour – Tired.
If I could banish Pain
And set my Spirit free
From prison cell of Body Need
And Time's brief Boundary.
I’d weave my weft through Day and Night
And never waste a Thought
To Flesh and Bone's necessity
My inspiration's – Lid.
(with thanks to Emily)
………………………………
On bad days
I eat mackerel
from the tin -
it’s not a common thing.
Exhaustion is more
skewering than pain
the two together
words fail to explain.
Try exercise says
my well-meaning friend.
My sister mutters something
of the same.
And there it ends.
……………………….
The Reaper
Ten times the reaper turned and swung
but only glanced my sleeve -
another force beyond his sight
spun swifter than his hooded eye
- quickened to act, deflect
the scythe,
protect, extend my life.
To be alive is grace
enough - time runs
and joyrides end,
grief soaks the harvest
of the young -
I stumble
at the crumbling edge
but I’m among the throng
with hope
for moving - on.
14 November 2005
………………
Still nature
has withheld her keys
to Planet X and Hercules
and teased my roving eye
too many times to remonstrate
too many treacheries of fate
have taught me not to trust
the late September heave of tide
that takes me for a ride.
But when I think the roll has left me
overthrown and dry
a ripple taps against my skin
and stirs some soundless ear within
that’s when I hear the new moon rise
and rattle in the sky.