The Priory

(The Priory became the only sanctuary from the persecution of my own thoughts. Could not imagine life on the outside. And yet, here I am, well and getting better. Looking in at that place from the outside is nice.)

(Remembering Gary, Hilary, Matt, Danielle, Lana, Toby, Becca, Beth, George, Richard, Caitlin. And Caio, Bhavna, Nicola, Christos and Harry.)

I remember that place
where I walked with those others.
Rough carpets and blank ceilings,
bland pictures that said nothing,
nothing that could reject or invite
or allow belonging.
And us others passing through this place,
mothers and children, addicts and saints,
stories flowing into stoic walls.

Curtains of ivy framing sash windows,
consultants ensconced in warm academic rooms
upstairs, at the tap trickling drugs that blunted our demons
while we raged and wept on the lower floors.

The garden with the border of red tulips,
defiant buggers that demanded we look.
Deflated balls lying around
for us to kick and ruminate over
while we talked and walked,
bared and covered.

The cold corridors with doors along it
like a tedious metaphor.
I stalked and sweated there.
Once I opened a door and looked in
on a child woman's tormented mind -
raped, addicted, judged, ashamed.
I ran back down that calm, cold corridor
and through my own unremarkable door.
Demented hermits we were behind the doors.

In my room I lay still, watching TV
day after day, escaping my thoughts.
They came with food and drink and care
and too loud voices and too bright lights
and made me wake, shower, eat and step out some.

There was love and philosophy and some simple things
pragmatic grit and resolute hope.
A little bit of everything went
into the making of my new peace.

On my last day, I was alone a lot in the garden.
The tree strewing pink blossoms
effortlessly, impartially,
on whose bed I sat and stared
for an hour at air.
A perfect circle of time,
broken perfectly by my child's embrace.

Outside in the disjointed world
I remember that sanctuary.
We others are among everyone.
No one hears our gnashing teeth
through the chatter of rambling days.
I'm learning it all again, how to be
a mother, a wife, God's loved child,
How to just be.

A warm memory

Warm brown faces, dust-sweat streaked,
drooping trees and baking streets.
Brave little voices clamouring
in frenzied games of songs and stones.
Lost embraces from the past.

(Reworked. First draft 11/04/12 @The Priory. Listening to Jagjit Singh.)

Art Therapy

I feel ready to share what I wrote and write some new stuff about my time at the Priory, recovering from my breakdown. I met some wonderful folk there and I want to make sure I remember them. So here's the first instalment.

For George the doctor and Richard the musician.

On an insolent day of April blue
I sat with alabaster shadows.
Wan faces turned away
from tempestuous tulips
that hurt our eyes.

'Paint a picture. Anything you see.'
I see fear but I won't look
I won't look I won't look!
I gather my blankness around me:
white, clinical, sanitised.

'How about some colours and brushes?'
I say I was never one for art.
Shrug. Pick up the brush.
Ragged grotesque strokes.
Shame. Strangled scream.
I told you I didn't want to look.

George showed me his work:
a darling delicate daffodil.
We were children then
daring through our infancy.
A few pallid petals
that survived a burning bough.

(Reworked. First draft: 11/04/12 @The Priory.)

On a dull October afternoon

Today is one of those grey, dreary days. It's foggy and dark outside and inside my head. I'm that 'patient etherised upon a table'. I'm not really here, not anywhere. Feel little of anything,  maybe a little sad at some things, mostly disconnected from everything. I am exhausted easily by little things - showering, eating,  playing with my son. The effort involved in getting through the day is unreasonably high. I was ready to go back to the unchallenging comfort of bed after making my son breakfast.

Today is also one of those days where I can watch the tide flow and not drown in it. I'm learning to stand by the water, still,  and let the tide wash my feet. I'm learning to not rush into every emotion I feel, flailing in the rising waters and not being able to see past it. (A metaphor I was instructed in at the Priory, where I spent some time recovering from my breakdown.) It has been dark and dreary for a few days but it will pass. I have faith.

Am I happy? I keep asking myself this, as an index to decide which direction I should take, what choices I should make. When I asked myself this over the past few years, the answer was always shaky. I was happy momentarily a lot when I did some things but I always felt fearful of those things ending. I used to fear waking up in the morning to go to work, fear returning home from anywhere, fear looking in the mirror. I used to fear meeting people. I felt afraid and anxious, always. Nowadays when I ask myself 'am I happy?' I notice that the answer is more certainly, more regularly 'yes'. I am more at peace with myself. I am still trying to work out all the tags and labels that make me, but it's a great ride, this exploring of me. I like who I am more now. I have surprised myself. I am not at all unfulfilled as a stay at home mother, in fact I have never felt more creative, more enlightened, more content. I have very little money and I find it liberating. It's so much easier to say no to the pressures of a consumerist culture's recognisable traps when you just don't have the enabling agent! I have freed myself from relationships that were meaningless and bound simply in expectations and pretensions. I have detached myself from relationships which I am still duty bound to, but which provide no joy, no nourishment. I have found poetry in my child's voice. I have found stronger reaffirmation of my faith than in any time spent amongst the loudly faithful.

So today when I'm in that familiar displaced, dislocated fog, I have just stopped struggling and let it have its run. This too shall pass. It will be a brighter day soon. I am this displaced self and much more. I am ok with who I am.

So today I smile at the black dog and tell it to stick around and watch as I make Halloween craft with my son and some cakes for a friend's birthday. The bats, spiders and bugs are really taking shape (note you unforgiving school teachers who wrote off my art skills). The cakes look messy, have to wait to taste them. The black dog is still sulking in the background but I'll probably go for a walk in the awful weather if he gets too unpleasant. My grey fog can meet the grey fog outside; I can stay busy with the special madness that muddy puddles excite in a toddler.

Once upon a train journey

I could pretend that through the branchfuls of sky I can glimpse God

That the light fingered clouds are something more than

Magic to a child

Below, blinking houses

packed into the ground

Sucking space

Red bricks bleed

White fronts pale

Man and Superman I see.

God I imagine.

A tale of love, healing and a curse

At the age of 33 my husband was diagnosed with ME/CFS. There is apparently no cure, just ‘managing the condition’. I watch my geriatric young husband stumble through his days in a fog of exhaustion and confusion. Every failed attempt at raising a limp arm or formulating a weak thought burns a welt on my consciousness.

Alternately, I rage at the universe, pray fervently and sometimes beg, curl up into a ball of defeat, turn up my chin defiantly and cope.

In my secret reckonings with God I ask why, if he is the loving father that I believe him to be, would our lives be tossed around in a mighty sea in such a careless way. And always the answer comes back: 'ask yourself what you have done, ask that hungry, all-consuming darkness in you what it has done to your love'.

(PS: Thought of e e cummings’ ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ today.)

Once upon an indifferent time,

there was a damsel much damaged.

She sat by the wayside and dreamt of a prince

who would kiss her withered lips.

One evening of brew and kindling touch,

the promised prince arrived on a dream.

After much singing and dancing around trees

the damsel and the prince were wedded in bliss.

There followed the interminable middle,

as happy as tale endings are.

Many moons waked and sunsets dawned,

they lived the fairy part of the tale.

The prince couldn’t stop the falling in love

and he fell into magical healing powers.

The damsel’s deadened damaged selves

grew animated languorously.

Many more moons and sunsets passed.

‘Til once, under a suitably stormy sky,

the damsel stared at a terrible truth:

the prince was slowly crumbling away.

The random curse of a careless witch:

at the highest of his helpless falling his

spirit would leave him, and take with it

all his love and youthful years.

On that fateful stormy night

the damsel’s hungry distress rose

and cried out for love’s sustenance,

while the prince crumbled like paper in flames.

Thus was the dismal denouement:

the prince became as dust in the air;

the damsel was left for all her days

with fragments only half alive.

Night Terrors

3 AM. Another night spent awake and alone, shaking in the memory of my child screaming and pushing me away, recoiling from me. Health Visitor  says this is Night Terrors. What has he seen that has blighted his tender mind so? Thought of Sylvia Plath's poem 'Child' and borrowed heavily from it.

Child,
you scream in fear and recoil from me.
Have I unguarded let you look
into my infinite churning despair?
Did I fail to silence an anguished wail?

Once we imagined meandering tales
in bedtime shadows and warm yellow lights,
we flew with dragons of faraway magic
and soared with the moon on the wing of a giggle.

Am I now the ceiling without stars
That haunts your clear eye?

Poppies at a Cenotaph

By the busy roundabout near my house
stands a tall colourless monument
stubbornly still, as the traffic whirls.

I must have passed it a hundred times;
it tells me the commute's end is near.

Today as I passed the silent stone
I saw at its feet wreaths of poppies,
and I stopped for the first time, transfixed.
Poppies of paper - fragile and brave,
confronting gently the passing day.

The obelisk reached quietly up
into the autumnal English sky,
the inscription of names fading away.
There was courage and sadness in its shape.

I knelt down. The ageing monolith,
paper flowers and fading names
gathered me up into their space.
Someone had seen. And remembered.
Someone had stopped and cried red tears.

(Bexley 2006)

Evenings spent alone indoors

I lie in my tomb, dreading, listening

to half heard conversations and distant footsteps,

I sense living on the other side,

Excluding me, condemning me.

Inside, imprisoned in my mind,

There are eyes, disapproving,

And contorted smiles,

Shadows of utterances,

Unclothing and shaming.

At every scrape at the door,

I perk up hoping for someone to call.

Nobody comes. Nothing happens.

I run from them and long for them.

The failure of anonymity,

The isolation of insanity.

The magic little pills explode in my head

In a ritual of death and resurrection.

Sleep brings on the death fantasy

And the stilling of the cosmic hostility.

But there is always a waking from the death-sleep,

As the chemical fog melts away

And old enemies circle around.

(At University, 2003)

Memory of a young Namboodiri

An ancient house of stone
And a statue of stone.

Incessant chanting in a dead language,

Flames dancing in the dying day,

The kiss of incense on the quietened soul.

He arrives after his ritual bath,

Honest: in wet thin cladding.

Caresses and adorns the stone

In gold, silk and sandalwood paste.

He bathes, feeds and worships the stone.

The young watch and their spirits move,

In tender, exciting, rising piety.

Hands folded, eyes wandering,

Foreheads ablaze with godliness,

The hair on his chest gripping their hearts,

The mysticism of his chanting

And the purity of his lineage

As potent as an aphrodisiac.

They worship the man as much as the stone.

God, Love, Worship and Shoes

On a dull Sunday morning

We gather outside the church doors:

Mothers and fashionable children,

Fathers with bright prams and new babies

(Eye shadows sparkle and lipsticks smile at

Expensive watches and crisp perfumes).

Smiling men in dark suits

Welcome each one personally,

(Their ties shine in their trendiness)

Pat the children and wink at them

Shake hands heartily, laugh grandly,

Exchange kisses and

Predictable jokes.

Each one is welcomed, each one is loved.

So much studied and practised love.

‘Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God;

And every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.’

The tall walls rise to meet

Hands joined in prayer.

Heaven dangles before hope filled sinners.

My head bowed, I see

The lady next to me has lovely shoes,

Red, that match her suede jacket.

I look at them and admire them;

My shoes aren’t all that bad either.

A tall leather affair that cost a week’s pay.

I must get a dress to match.

God does not speak to me here.

(Bexley 2006)