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HOME ABOUT BRENDA KEATS HOUSE THE OVERDOSE LIFE AND DEATH IN CAMDEN DEATH AND THE MAIDEN THE ENFIELD SONNETS THE PAIN CLINIC THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT NEW POEMS PROTESTS ART GALLERY REVIEWS LINKS
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Why am I asked to justify my fear When interminable memory weighs Heavy on my mind, my refuge is here Where I am forced to contend and always With my back against the wall. Everything I have known has gone, the familiar Disappeared long before its echoing After. In vain I search for the lode-star Of my being but there is nothing near Enough to show me where to go, no one But insubstantial shadows as they veer Away from me, a collaboration That would end even as it had begun With an illusion left to lean upon.
Why can I not be made to feel welcome Or allowed to come in from the outside Just to rest awhile as a refuge from A world where there is nowhere left to hide, I am a nameless fugitive and mute With a language known from another time, Standing my ground with nothing to refute And rudely pushed away from what is mine. And yet the pain is something I must bear Until there is a time to put it down, Memory loosens its hold and I dare Not cannot let it go for I shall drown. There is nothing to bring to ferry me To the future except disparity.
How casually transference is thrown Away as though it is of no accord, Something unfinished with everything known And left outstanding severed by a sword, An open wound that will not close again, There is all the terror of betrayal Uncoiling like a tightened spring, in vain The memory and momentum of it all, Something broken and left in disarray Even as a far reaching unending Amnesia beginning to set in. Only the vestiges still remaining Will last but nothing will ever begin Just a feeling of nothing left to say.
How impossible it is from the stand Point of a patient even to be heard, Everything gets turned round on the one hand And on the other not a single word Of criticism is allowed except At the cost of a huge emotional Affray. Countertransference is adept, Hiding itself behind a colossal Smoke screen, a casual play of shadows Slanting the day, as a deliberate Subterfuge mimicking loyalty grows In between the hours, random and innate, A sense of betrayal the only proof, The mute facts of feelings the simple truth.
When I turned around you had disappeared Before I was aware of your absence, Something suddenly reached the end and veered Off leaving without a trace, with a forlorn sense Of meaning that somehow came to nothing. My mind hurts with the lasting illusion Of it all, nothing that is existing Has any permanence even from one Day to another and bound together By a mute ineffaceable darkness Woven in between before and after As memory begins to coalesce. In silence since exists the certainty That you were supposed to be there for me.
It was a belief in you that kept things Going though frequently I had to face That nothing was in place, an echo rings In my ears beneath the passing surface Of the years, that this had happened many Times before, yet somehow I was always To mislay my fears, managing any Left over doubts and subsumed in the days After as something stemming from my own Sensibility left there sometimes raw And over exposed, a figure alone In a negative aligned in the core Of light erasing everything before In the white haze left there after a war.
It was as if the words had been written Before, as though they had always been there Waiting to be heard or summoned, often I saw them in dreams a shadow after And seen suddenly in between the haze Of another world, silent with their own Time, trapped in their history, in a maze Of meaning, an interval unheard shown In the darkness before it had occurred. What caused it to align with a sudden Experience, the mute path hurt and lured Me back struggling with something forgotten And yet awake and using poetry To sound and encompass reality.
And all the years I had known in the art Room were overturned and dismantled round Me, there among the ruins how my heart Ached for this loss, for time just left aground. The locked unfinished pictures lay before Me trapped forever in their origin, Left without any means of rescue or Release, as something I could imagine No more. How my senses longed for colour Even as it began to drain away Flowing from the present and the future, The monochrome of a forgotten day, With nothing left over to remember Me by, to show I had ever been there.
Somewhere along the line the pictures fused With the poems and I could not explain How this had occurred or why feeling bruised The more that memory began to wane, Until my mind had become an open Wound, a narrow fissure on the surface Of a timeless vacuum that often Seemed about to explode under the trace Of something existing and beforehand, With nothing in place to ease the pressure Enough to be able to understand The far monochrome region at the core Of being, the sunless light in a dream In the starless darkness of things that seem.
Even the pictures were seen before they Were drawn, locked somewhere fast where I could not Reach them and existing so far away That only in the finished picture what I had seen then became perceptible Triggering memory from long ago, An experience lodged in the shortfall Of time, there leaning on its own shadow, A sense of something waiting to happen As though the end itself was left on hold And waiting for me to catch up, often Allowing me to hold something untold And unrealised, balancing its load, With destiny left in the standby mode.
All the years just came to a standstill, There in the art room where the atmosphere Without warning was unmanageable, When nothing was allowed to interfere With the headlong momentum of something Beneath the surface closing the foreground The sound of confrontation echoing Without end, a reality that wound Itself around me until I was bound About in its inexorable hold, There waylaid even as I ran aground By language alone and what the words told. And seven years were as though they never Existed, either before or after.
The confrontation when it came about Was final and sudden and everything Was left resounding in its wake without Recourse to reason, any suffering Was ignored then and there for it could all Be put down to an overreaction But what was lost was irretrievable, An overriding faith in someone known Was gone, and my mind had been pushed too far And the years collapsed and came to an end Abandoned and now unfamiliar And then as a future I could depend On no more, a structure insubstantial No more than an interval left to stall.
This was a rerun of two months before And now I was trying to repair it Again but this time there was nothing more To be done, the wound was a direct hit And there was no way out, I could not go On pretending I was wanted any More. In vain I tried to say there was no Way I could speak about my pain, many Times people were allowed to pressurize Me in the group, it seemed they were going In for the kill, I could not recognize The art therapist who kept insisting On a reply as though I must answer For my pain with no before or after.
It was open season, people could say What they wanted but I was not allowed To remain silent or in any way Prevent it happening, there in the crowd It seemed that the only thing to be done Was to flee in tears distraught from the art Room, so many were the times lost among The years, I had left there coming apart Only to return again with self blame Knowing well that nothing could be explained, This time nothing would ever be the same, The door remained closed as the future waned In the distance, as I was turned away For remaining there with nothing to say.
It took seven years to get rid of me So strong was my capacity to cling On for the sake of the pictures and only By turning a blind eye could anything Be accomplished there yet art therapy Was the one way out of an endless maze, Colour that veered off into poetry Was left to drain away through those last days Until all that was left was a black space A burnt out uncontrollable feeling That the void I would leave on the surface Of the paper was the heart of being, The extinct core seen in a dream as though In the light I became my own shadow.
Colour drained away in much the same way Almost two years before when as a last Resort to try and save the art room, day By day I went without food in a fast That was to last for three months, at the end Of which, Fordwych House was allowed to stay As it was but the joy could not amend The weeks of pain that would not go away, That flowed into the protest that followed In the nine months after. Hunger reduced Colour to a hollow spectrum, a mode Of darkness encompassed by a sealed fused Light leaving me with no way out and like The monochrome hours of a hunger strike.
April 2003
You say that you’re concerned about my pain More so the level of anxiety And however hard I try to explain Trust has just been eroded within me. No one should try to cure too readily For this is a pressure impossible To contend with, how many before me Were never to be given the choice, still Less a voice with which they could answer no. The terror that can circulate around A room, constricting and then letting go As idealization runs aground As though I have mislaid my own shadow, The closed door is the only place I know.
Yet I do not know where to go with my Sorrow, there is nowhere here that is near, There is no answer to my question why The echo of fear is all I can hear. I end up thinking that life itself is A slow unfolding feeling of being Beaten up and every time the crisis Feels worse. I never get beyond seeing That people are there to be believed in, To the last reach blind to their betrayal, And I don’t know how to end or begin. I experience time as a trial Of words or the language of the spirit Taking itself to its furthest limit.
Snow is faintly falling through a crisis, Blowing against the foreground left behind, With my back against the wall the premise That there was nowhere I could fall, aligned In my mind as a gravitational Force stemming from a fulcrum of its own, Where Meaning has no cohesion at all Except through time unravelling alone And snow falling far through the universe Reflecting into darkness all around, An unlit interval where I rehearse A life that only I can hear the sound Of before a window this side of snow Blurring on the horizon long ago.
Poetry is still able to console Even as another day takes its leave And the headlong dark is out of control Already distant when I start to weave A life endlessly through the residue Of the nights lost and the length of the days To come, where they stall as though late or due Before their time, lodged in a listless haze. The poems will make it to the future And yet somehow out of nothing they come Entirely as they are and beyond cure And its reach and with no one to summon Them here towards a precipitate end Among the broken things I could not mend.
It is difficult to negotiate The unfolding precipitous footpath Of the ‘talking cure’, too soon or too late And there is nothing but the aftermath Of a wrong turning, the slow circuitous Forgotten route back to the beginning Again, lost among the coterminous Echoes of life alongside existing Within the past tense of the verb to be. The future is seen as if in a dream Already there, not the reality Of falling through the air to things that seem, Experience is unalterable, Bewildering the battle of it all.
My feelings have been found to be extreme Summed up measured and found to be wanting They are not acceptable to ‘the team’ Any more than a poem’s existing, And let us be honest it is language In its own right that is really on trial Here as something that nothing can assuage, As the only fact beyond denial Not a life they can only abandon. A force can be harnessed from the empty Air and left there when everything has gone, Feeling resounding through vacuity Beyond the reach of the ordinary, Outside the compass of reality.
I have passed through such a time in despair Completely unable to understand That I am alone and lost in the air I breathe without anyone near at hand To help me on the journey to shoulder An unbearable unmanageable Weight, its pressure on my mind, the after Sound registering on an endless scale, Veering somewhere into infinity. There is nothing that can keep it confined Or outside the reach of humanity, Only my shadow tearing at its mind, The end an illusion from empty air, Without the tender there is no one there.
Why has this pressure been put on my mind The only offence I gave was to be Ill, it was exerted by a combined Team pushing me towards extremity. It seemed as though my spirit was up for Grabs, the vestiges of a life for sale, My innermost thoughts were spread out before Me open tattered pages left to trail An abandoned debris along the ground. My sensibility bound and censured Was made to bow and scrape without a sound A captive held there somehow to be lured To a false and final diagnosis The slipped unnoticed noose of psychosis.
For months I hardly dared to lift my head Higher than the level of floors or shoes Doing everything by the book, instead An offer was made that I could not choose To ignore, either to accept or go Back to a flat I could not exist in, I remained there unresisting although Restless questioning began to set in And therapy became slow coercion To an agenda entirely of their Own, seeking to impose medication Against a background of open despair. Sometimes isolate pictures got me though Or poetry from everything I knew.
And I was made to sit before you all For making a complaint, nothing was real, It was as though on some impossible Whim everyone was gathered to appeal To my reason and nothing remained there Of the place I had known before, only A memory of who I was after Was to come away with me. And every Lasting thing that had yet contributed To my suffering was either denied Or simply lied about, nothing mattered, I was just effaced even as I tried To stand my ground, fading as a shadow Before them into everything I know.
And when you came to justify your care, By then I was wholly indifferent I was losing nothing, I could not fare Any worse, by the end we were not meant To meet anymore. I wanted to run From you and run from the day hospital, How I longed never to have to return Again, existing and my life in thrall Or as an overrun territory Wide open to a marauding army And with no way out left there with my back Against the wall and open to attack, Helpless without any defence in place Against an enemy I could not face.
None of you were there when I needed you And it seemed that you all just slowly turned Away, everything I was going through Was marginalised or ignored, I learned From this side of therapy that nothing Really mattered to anyone at all. Not the past years their locked continuing Impact, an endless shadow left to fall Along every morning when I awoke Until the whole of my life was open Wide with its mute pain as the new day broke Into an aching irreversible Silence, a future unattainable.
My punishment for not being able To cope with the death of my mother all Those years ago, was irrevocable, At every level I was told to pull Myself together and face the future, To simply put the life of another Behind me and this was somehow the cure For everything in my childhood after It came to its precipitate ending. And I was urged then to confront my pain And to justify its continuing, As though being judged again and again, A guilty verdict not negotiable For a pain that is impenetrable.
You hijacked the therapy in order To coerce me into medication, And confronted by despair you never Listened but chose instead in each session To bend me unresisting to your will, I who simply needed you to be there Was silent with an unmanageable Hidden fear while you were forced to repair Week by week the damage you inflicted Casually and deliberately And without remorse. There a mounting dread Accompanied me, as anxiety Was seized upon as something you could fix With the worst of the antipsychotics.
I am expected to release my pain As though it were some long imprisoned thing Allowing me to visit it again And again going through its suffering While pacing the floor of its containment Inextricable behind a sealed door In a low artificial permanent Light, unceasingly entering the core Of a mind porous to the clamouring Echoing all around. A fixed sentence That no one can overturn for something Beyond understanding that happened once In another time, just to let it go I must walk away from my own shadow.
And only in psychoanalysis Am I free from the unmanageable Burden of necessity, a crisis Of conscience inherent that is able To mimic the inimical in me, Drawn to an unfathomable pitfall Where I must, as though in reality, Try to pull myself together. The pall Of a far haze stretches out before me Whenever I remember those first days, Unfolding gathering infinity Left encircled enclosed within a maze Where I turn about searching near and far For the lost name of the familiar.
April 2003
Coming Through
You never let on when I spoke to you But it was your hand that rejected me When I reached out for recognition, too Mute, while I was outside the Royal Free Hospital, sat there on a bench writing Poetry from a protest that lasted For nine months against the continuing Dwindling of mental health beds, you who said So little at that time, then said nothing At all ‘not wanting a debate’ and you Allowed to refute me for complaining. I salute you, a liar through and through, You, who left me to anonymity, Are tarred with literary infamy.
I’m tired of the promises and nothing Forthcoming, an endorsement, a review That never gets off the ground, leaving Me without any future except through The high auspices the undeserving Charity of endless literary Dullards, friends of friends and an unending Wastage of resources, vital money That a poet needs to live on, the lack From which, poetry unrecognised or Not sustained will surely die. I turn back To an echo effaced in a mirror And searched for endlessly and never found, The sound of the poets standing their ground.
Search for me in the shadows the silent Echoes of the outsider in your midst, A recurring sound that was never meant To be heard left in the shortfall and blitz Of time. The darkness of the future lies Heavy on my mind, it exists as an Open door that is closed and that defies All reason. I amount to no more than A footnote from a protest here and there Yet Eliot received the Nobel Prize The night I was born, the years after were Encompassed by silence such that it cries Out for recognition from a mute despair, From the starless darkness of London’s glare.
I cannot say I have been forgotten Never having been remembered even In the interval of more than twenty Years, writing, existing at the margin Of things, somewhere at the periphery Between night and day as shadows within The half-light, as the haze before morning Breaks its banks when sometimes stars still adhere Stalling through the surface of their waning, A blue residuum suspended near The origin of imagination, Or a dream when the end comes too early, The ultimate impossibility Of how to finish what I have begun.
Sometimes a poem comes without effort At first leaf open and sudden in spring More often than not it has to be fought For, wrought and casually emerging As the high votive tapering blossom The closing darkness of the chestnut tree. “Our Lady’s Candles” we used to call them No sooner lit than a fragmentary Rust coloured debris carried on the air Or as an open outstretched April fan Of seeming snow lost as soon as found there With the narrative of how it began, Limp leaves struggle under a scaffolding Of April’s burnt out candles vanishing.
How shall I make an answer to you all When there is nothing more that I can do, From here there is no further I can fall And it was never about coming through Enough or receiving literary Charity undeserved unjustified Or even the worthless anthology, It was more about why a poet cried. Then as now, as Keats knew, nothing can be Altered, the lineaments of language Are set in stone as the fixed parity Of the ordinary of a mute age, And poets die at the edge of its sword, For we write as we must without reward.
You have my scorn for your bleak little piece In the TLS, you who know nothing Of me, nothing of my twenty year lease On a place in poetry, ongoing Rights of an existing statutory Tenant, with time as witness, are being Contested here but I am already There. Your only recourse lies in suing For eviction using an outright track Record of lies in order to secure What is yours as landlords of language. Lack Lustre Director was it really your Pity that you thought I wanted from you, I know you all of you bastards I’m through.
For the first time I stood up to someone For all the injustice I had suffered Through no fault of my own and in the sum Total of things it was the least deserved, The one thing I could do something about Without resorting to a strategy Of just suffering for my beliefs. Out Of the gridlock of the literary World I had pushed back my mind and body To their furthest extreme while allowing Its rejection to run right over me, With my last breath I just kept on writing. It is too late I am the unquiet Guest that will never sit at your banquet.
The debate that you fear has been going On for centuries and it will not go Away, it laps at the fact that nothing Can be done, that there has always been no Way through. Poetry could bow down in shame At the manner of its own demeaning, For a language now dumbed down, and the blame For allowing an assault on meaning Belongs to the poets alone, and yet We let it happen, I who should have known As much as anyone, refused to get Involved and veered off on a track alone, Dullards are now the arbiters of choice Drowning out the individual voice.
You can’t ignore me now as you have done So many times before, this time I’m here To stay with all that I have lost and won. Having lived and lodged at extremes of fear I’m not afraid of anyone any More, I am at the door, there to confront What is mine, remembering the many Times it was casually closed in front Of me as it was when I was a child Reaching out to the hand of charity, ‘You get what you’re given and no more’ riled Against my years and sensibility, Fugitive alongside my mother through The maze of darkness and the streets she knew.
Alison your letters of rejection Have gone before you and they are renowned Both for their cruelty and precision, While something approaching glee can be found There as you deliberately proceed To ram your message home. Once your fellow Traveller similarly felt the need To stamp a poet into the ground, though I remember he was given a run For his money, Barry Tebb’s rejection By him, was then sent out to everyone, Peter Forbes became a passing mention, Now intent on damaging poetry Promoting a worthless anthology.
And this was the closest I ever came, There I amounted to almost nothing, The five minute floor spot had to contain My pain and to keep it from exploding. And I listened to those they lionised And looked on from the shadows at the press Line up for the archives, unrecognised Unfeatured and missing from the endless Photographs taken from the years I read There, while grappling with a mounting feeling Of the hurt of it all, that existed At the end of a survivors evening, The want of a sonnet ruined the show The closed door is the only place I know.
And don’t give me your sadness or concern You have feathered your own nests for too long, The years I have wasted trying to learn Patience and never allowed to belong. The times I have stood there among you all Desperate to read yet coming apart, Only too glad of a five minute call Wondering why the future wouldn’t start. And left there to somehow apologise For my pain, appearing too serious, While railroaded through to the only prize To sound my own voice in the time that was Allowed, yet my name seemed not to exist, After every floor spot mislaid or missed.
I existed for years trying to keep Things going yet knowing it could not last For very long, knowing that without sleep They would be bought to a standstill amassed As poems with nothing to fall back on And with a future always out of reach. All the wasted years I am lost among, The false turnings and the unending search For a way out, the interminable Silence yields its secrets only after Its pain, sensed and near in the interval Of shadows, a level of time I dare Not turn from nor yet try to comprehend, A growing intimation of the end.
Driven by something left diminishing I am carried along by the slipstream, A rhythm waning and yet finishing On another shore somewhere in a dream, In the currents of language endlessly Returning beckoning me to follow, The reality of disparity Behind me awhile as the undertow Or existence from which everything flows. Imagination is hard to borrow From, envisaged for the moment it grows And then it is gone leaving no shadow On which to cling, as only an echo Resounding and with nothing left to show.
It is because I’m so tired that I no Longer care, having always given way To other people, brought up to be so Polite, until at the end of the day Deference has been eroded within Me, pushed as far as I could be, with my Back against the wall, straining in the din Of the crowd for a simple reason why I should not ask for more, having nothing With which to barter except the poems, In vain as in a mirror reflecting, The limits of language and its rhythms The spirit’s echo which I sometimes see At night staring forlornly back at me.
April 2003
Beaten Back May 2003
The words are buried somewhere deep and I Am left to drag them from the agony Of their existence, lifeless as they lie And dissolving in anonymity Leaving not a trace of their narrative Behind, the effaced nights of another Time when my mother was a fugitive Running for her life echoing after From a language poised between pursuer And pursued and there where I falter mute, Carrying the silence of my mother The words she was too afraid to refute. Poetry makes a meaning of it all Even as memory begins to stall.
Only by reading a poem aloud Can I find out what has happened before From words left out or openly avowed, Silence echoes reaching into the core Of being, sounding the limits of time Even when my mind has come to a halt Rhythm surges beneath its paradigm, Searching a surface rhyme, its last assault On memory before the night closes Down and before my mind explodes under The strain of what a new day exposes. Nothing lasting seems to exist after A poem, only the far disarray From darkness once that on the surface lay.
I long for a refuge in which to write, The day sears as shadow overexposed In the light and nothing can put it right, It effaces as the blur from the closed Shutter of a camera’s lens, nothing Has any permanence but in a dream Lost at the time of its remembering, Yet something existing that might have been And pushing memory to breaking point Like an outstretched fan opened out never To be folded back again, out of joint, Left on hold fading into time after, Each panel the sum total of its day, An interstitial dark its disarray.
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