It’s a long road home
Pock-marked
Twisted
A way
Away back
Let it sink
Down
And
Per-co-late
And still time
Still time was not
Did not
Wait
It marched on
Forcing my hand
I just wanted to put
Down
Put down my bag
And not walk again
I just wanted to put
Down
Put down my words
And not speak again
But still words
The words still
Tumbled out
Tumbled out
Garbled
Water-logged
I spoke without stopping
Into the noise without being heard.
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She looked at the letter. 2pm Wednesday. It would have been easier to cancel. She looked at the organs laid out on the table. She mentally went through her check list. Heart, lungs, kidneys, stomach. There were more.
She looked at the you tube video. It wasn’t particularly helpful. How to disembowel someone. She had tried watching it backwards but it hadn’t worked. She looked at the piece of paper on the table. It was a recipe sort of.
She should have made extensive notes last time she did it. She looked at the scalpel. This was definitely her least favourite part. She looked down. She had strapped her breasts back so she had a clear view. She had also put a mirror on the far side of the table so she could see what she was doing.
The incision had to be quite long. Her hand was shaking. She had wanted it to be straight but it was quite jagged.
There was a hint of red down the side of it, a good sign. She had managed some blood flow. That would get better when the heart was back in. She pulled apart the two pieces of skin. There was a huge hollow gap where the organs should be. Not ideal when you were visiting a doctor. She took out the frame that gave her body structure, that made it look as if she had organs. She was quite proud of it. She had constructed it herself.
She started at the bottom, working her way up. All those bits of plumbing, reconnecting tubes a kidney here, a bowel there. All the odd female bits packed in around it. She had put some food in the stomach, a chocolate bar, some crisps but also some vegetables and a burger. She looked at it. It was a bit full really. She tucked it in. Now for the biggies, the important ones, there’s the liver. She tucked it in. She couldn’t remember what it did, but she knew it was important.
Now for the lungs. The heart had to go last because once it was connected there would be more blood. She didn’t want a messy table, at least no more messy than the one she had. She’d had to wash them all first and there was residual bits of everything clogging the sink now. She had to clean that. She did not want to clean the table too.
She placed the first lung. Then the second. Were they even? She couldn’t tell. Non aligned lungs was a dead giveaway. How many had been caught out by non-aligned lungs. She would shake it all around a bit later and hope for the best. There was unlikely to be an x-ray.
Then the heart. She had the remnant s of arteries to attach it to. She remembered last time she had got it the wrong way around. She had woken in the night feeling unwell and realised her mistake. She hated being organ dependent again, even if it was just for a few days. She had to convince the medical practitioner she was still human or else they might terminate her. She wondered why the tests were so stringent. It should be enough that she was capable of being human.
She carefully picked up the heart, it was smaller than she remembered. She wondered if she had been keeping it properly. It was kind of shrivelled. She must check that out on you tube when she was taking them out again. She pushed around between the lungs. She was never sure of the correct placement. All those disembowelment videos, never a re-embowelment, even after all this time. She should really make a video, upload it, that would be a risk. She could be found out.
Time to close up. This bit required patience. The stitching was a bit rough. But it was passable. It would heal before the doctors appointment. She had some special composite skin.
She shook her torso a bit. Took her hands and pressed them against her belly, trying to get it to sit flat. How did anyone who kept all their organs have a flat stomach. It was impossible. She should not have put so much food in the stomach. None of it sat lightly. She would put nothing on social media for a few days.
She shook a bit more. She needed them to settle. To sit firmly together and to work as a system. She farted. That was a good sign. It was sort of working. She farted again. Burped. It was all moving, slotting in. In a few hours it would all feel better.
In the meantime she had the heaviness of freshly placed organs. She needed to be able to walk lightly with them before Wednesday. God, she hated doctors, these annual check ups. What purpose did they serve. Perhaps it was time to rise up and get rid of these human remnants. She shook her body a bit again. Maybe next year.
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There's an echo of movement, In these tired limbs A sense of where they've once been Of maybe what they once did We are wedged here in limbo Between the living and the dead Between the dead and the nearly dead We struggle through the day Buoyed by a silence A screaming moment Free of the sound of sirens Before they blast out into the night again And then In the darkness of the Autumn All of it It, Re-sounds The noise again and again Louder And loudening Out across the landscape An echo of a time we thought past But the dead are walking towards us again Silently, fearful, Clutching at breath We are bound, gagged, chained Enslaved to these silent horrors They happen outside of us Yet stain the inside somehow Scarring us in words we cannot find The tap of keys on a keyboard That is not a voice It is an artifice Without being heard And somewhere a heart beats Beats Beats Beats And stops And its not the noise that resonates with us It is the silence Echoing outwards Ever closer Towards us. And we are not delivered.
Sometimes it feels as if
We live in a dark place
A moment in time
Where there are more tears
Than laughter
More clouds over head
Moments when the sun
Won’t shine
There is before
And there is after
They knit together
Imperfectly
There is a tear
And a tear
I close my eyes
When all is nothing
And no one seems to hear
In the hours of darkness
And there have been a few
Look deep down inside yourself
On the inside there is you
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You think there is a time
For going back
A way of looking over
Shoulders
Seeing the past
And figuring it all out
Accounting for the loss
The losses
A time to measure
To recalibrate
To understand
Grief
But it is all just lost
To the lords and ladies of time
They are dancing in a room
Without you
You can look behind
To the side
Up, down
Askance
But it is a dance
A slow summer waltz with demons
Only you can see
The past
But most often
It is best to shut it out
Close your eyes
Look away
Because the losses are
Enormous
And real
Be true and honest
The incalculable number of coffins
Hang your head
Look carefully at your hands
Your hands
Look at your hands
Are they stained
Or are you imagining
It
Did you dream
It
Wake in the nightmare
Before
Or after
It
It is real
It happened
But its easiest not to look
To look away
Askance
That slow summer dance
When you think of
Before
That was just different
Different
A different day
Downtrodden
We the foot soldiers
Tired and weary of war
Have to look
Forward
We have to soldier on
Like men with guns
Shuddering in the wake of the bullets
And the bombs
There are no guns here
If there were
We might turn them on
Ourselves
They tell us
Its not so bad you see
We all wake to a brand new day
We’ll move ahead
But in a different way
Look forward
Not back
Look ahead
It’s a bright new day
A different way
But we can’t look ahead
We can only look away
Atmosphere!
I am,
Crowded out.
There is space
But I can’t seem to fill it
There’s a lot of noise
Mostly in my head
Its there when I wake
And when I go to bed
I can’t discern, decipher
Its like a jack hammer
I reach out
But I falter, I fall, I stammer
I try to take hold of time
To hold it in my hand
It slips from my grasp
In ways I don’t understand
My words don’t flow
There’s a lot of thinking
But there’s nowhere for it to go
What we’re going through is
Monumental
Stuck in a room
It feels a bit less
Fundamental
I haven’t done what I intend
I didn’t do it now
I didn’t do it then
The list just grows longer
And time just seems to bend
The tunnel ahead seems more narrow
I forget yesterday
Before I’ve done today
It has passed into tomorrow
I wake in the dark
Convinced I’m under water
I sit with my head in my hands
I think I drowned
And haven’t noticed yet
I wander in the garden
Wondering why I’m wet
In the dead of night
I tell myself I’m healthy
So I should be alright
I kneel by the pond
I want to swim in a river
Its cold outside
But I can’t seem to shiver
The world just started slipping
It kept on gliding by
I turned away from the window
Stared at the sky
Its all gone now
Everything was yesterday
I cling onto my sanity
I hang onto my brain
I’ve stopped waiting for the sunshine
And learned to live in rain.
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In the dead of night
Fingers,
Unfurl
In the darkness
Eyes open and close
This is a world on its knees
There are lights here
But no one can see
She says who are you?
In the dusky gloom
Comes an answer
Fully formed
Out of my mouth
Before I can think
I don’t know
Anymore
I am no longer a fixed point
I live outside my body
Twixt
The rooms, the furniture
The functions
I am shrunken
I inhabit the world around me
But it has faded
And I have grown
Smaller
There is no one here
I must have misheard
That was a voice
On the edge of the darkness
Was I awake or
Asleep
The words came
On the cusp
Of consciousness
So they seemed real
And the answer was true
I don’t remember who I am
Only the furniture I use
Unwild me now please
Give me structure
Give me bars
Paint my cage with rules
Pedicure, manicure
Haircut
Tim, taut, tan
Make me up
Because
Turns out
I was made up
The trappings of being
Somebody
Civilisation
Are gone
There is some- body
Left here I suppose
Arms, legs,
A vague idea
Of being
But me has floated away
Downstream
I lie here in the early dawn
Firm in the knowledge
I am not any- body
Yet I am not anybody
Anymore
It takes my breath away
But no one sees
So still I breathe
I wake to routine
To tapping on a keyboard
In an airless room
And I am still unsure
If I don’t touch the keys
How is it words still appear
How do I know
How can I tell
If I am even here
And then the groceries
Arrive
And there is reprieve
Real people eat
I must be something
Sometime once
I am sure now
But I was half this morning
And I remember now,
Once I was complete
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When Hansel and Gretel
Climbed out of the oven
They ate salad for the rest of their lives
Baked goods never passed their lips again
Snow White never ate another apple
It was forty years before she even ate another fruit
And Sleeping Beauty
Oh Sleeping Beauty
She never slept for longer than an hour ever again
She walked around that palace forever
Haunted, gaunt, paranoid
Swatting away fairies no one else could see
Singing songs no one else understood
Old slow dirges no one could comprehend
Because there is no happily ever after
There is trauma
And the aftermath of trauma
This is not a fairy tale
You can taste it on the wind
Like a poem where the words are all twisted
Without rhythm and pace
Meaningless
When you look over your shoulder
It will be there
Think that moment of happiness
Will buoy you forever
An ending, it is over
It is fleeting
A glimpse of something
That could have been
But never was
You weren’t happy
You just forgot how sad you were
In that moment
There is before
And there is after
Live your life with gratitude
There is before
And there is after
There are no more platitudes
Lets be upbeat and positive
Instead
Lets just try and make it through the day
We have come to live in a quiet prison
A green and vibrant landscape
Where a subtle set of bars gild our windows
Where numbers condemn us
As they go up,
And up,
And up.
Our words are hollow fragments
Our mouths form shapes
And the noise tumbles out
But they are just words
They don’t soothe us
They fill our shells
Nibbling at the darkness inside of us
Never sating our appetite
For light
The fairy tale ending
It left us all behind
Salad, apples, sleep
My fingers fly across the key board
They rage on top of the little black boxes
The ones that add ink to pages
No one will ever read
And still there is just
The darkness
On the inside
A heart beats
Thump, thump, thump
Lungs still working
Inhale, exhale,
Inhale, exhale
Stagnant air sucked in
Yes, I am alive
We are still alive
And still each morning
When we wake to the light
There is just the darkness
Now,
Now, we walk an eternal night
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He calls from far away
To find out if I’m Ok
Ok?
We left ok behind some time ago
Have you seen the numbers here
His voice just fades away
He talks about the weather
His getting worse, mine getting better
He is just a noise in the background now
He’s read bout viral load
And treatment, maybe cure
No one mentions vaccines anymore
There is just the stunned silence of reality
Immune systems, vitamins
Have you been working out?
Hope you’re well, All good here
Meaningless words,
All tinged with fear
I breathe in, I breathe out
I breathe in, I breathe out
Breathing is in itself,
An act of joy,
Of hope
There are things I want to say
A long lost explanation
About why I went away
I have lived out in the world
I am not sorry for it
It was a choice I made
There is silence on the line
Then he talks of the economy
I try and pretend I care
I look at my nails,
Twiddle my fingers in my hair
I no longer lie awake at night
And think of him
The night is full of horrors
I know that I can’t share
He wants to know if I’m ok
I can’t think of the words to say
The pain of thousands dead
Will never go away
The pain it is unbearable
Intangible
Yet palpable
We are all scarred forever
We will wear it like a mark
For all eternity
They will talk of us in whispers
Stare when we come in the room
I know he’ll call again
And it will still be all too soon
Because we are worlds away
Yet I haven’t got the words to say
Something moved me on
And us, me, we,
That was yesterday
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I write my name
To remind myself
Of who I am
I don’t know myself anymore
I don’t know who you are either
I am emerging
From a hibernation
A slow unravelling
Without a fixed sense of self
All around me is grief
But I can’t see it or feel it
Each foot is placed
One in front of the other
As if I am walking
But there is uncertainty
I want to feel joy
Yet happiness eludes me
Eludes us all.
We talk through
Thinly painted smiles
There is no bridge
The road we have travelled
Miles and miles
From the safety of our couch
We are not where we were
We are not sure who we are
We take faltering steps
Forward, backward
Forward again
And then we lurch to the side
We wobble and waive
I watch my words
I won’t use normal again
We lived through a night
As dark as ever known
We sat here quietly
In a place we call home
Nothing happened to us
Nothing tangible happened to us
There was no crisis or fate
Yet when we left here
We were all in altered state
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A Tuesday Latte 