Poems before heartbreak

This is my day 2 blog for BrokenOfBritain’s “One Month Before Heartbreak” Blogswarm.

None of these poems are new; they were either written or updated during the year noted at the bottom of each one.

I have selected them because each one illustrates some facet of my life with depression or my more recently acquired Disc Disease. I hope they will help others recognise why it is a futile and unfair exercise to reduce the lives of disabled persons to one line “descriptors” for assessment purposes.

As a lifelong depressive I was surprised when, while attending a psychiatric day hospital throughout 2005, I was informed that some of the repetitive thoughts that followed me everywhere were caused, not by my depression, but by a form of OCD.

As you will discover, none of my ailments is straightforward, and my OCD is no exception as it manifests itself through mind sapping repetitive thoughts and not through the physically exhausting repetitive actions which are usually linked to the condition. Many of the friends I made during that year did live lives encumbered with the observable version of the condition and I wrote this for, and about, one of them

Eau de Toilet

My friend wears her obsession

No, not the one by Calvin Klein,

Hers comes from the Spaniard, Dom Estos,

And smells “Original”? or “Pine”.

Every time she walks into a room

Ninety Nine percent of bacterians leave

While one percent just get the hump

When she rolls back her sleeves.

From banks of cushions on her sofa

She stares way out to see

The tiniest speck or crumb of dust

An atoll missed by you or me

She fights them with her bleaches

And just when I think she’s done

Her dust busting mini vac roars at her hip

Her battle is never won.

She splashes it all over

She’d sterilise the world

If it would only stand still long enough

Her duster waits unfurled

To the dirt and grime of living

Strong messages she sends

She now has something “six times strength”

To help her round the bend

My friend wears her obsession

No, not the one by Calvin Klein,

Her eau de toilet is reminiscent

Of hospital corridors, past times

Some might think she’s rather strange

I just think she’s free

And I feel very privileged

That my obsessed friend loves me.

© Bri 2006

Most of my (in my opinion) most desperate, navel gazing, “depression” poems were written between the ages of 11 and 20. Those poems, and my ability to operate on automatic pilot, got me by as I sought to avoid Psychiatric Medicine and the “electric cosh”, ECT, which was being used to “treat” all sorts of psychiatric conditions at that time. By the time this was written I was 27 and married with a 2 year old son and one newborn daughter.

The “Little Yellow Pill” was Vallium, prescribed by my GP who I had finally told about the depression because I was in a deep depression that I was unable to escape from utilising my usual strategies, and which was beginning to impact negatively on my family. The “yellow and black capsule” was an anti-depressant: I can’t remember what it was called but it was one of what were known as “tri-cyclic” anti-depressants. These were fairly new drugs at the time and one side-effect of them was to detach my mind from the day-to-day world even further than the depression did. I wrote this on the day I realised I had become addicted to the Valium, which had been prescribed to nullify some of the side-effects of the anti-depressants.

Little Yellow Pill 1977

My life is a little yellow pill

Taken three times a day

with a glass of whatever is handy at the time.

My world is oval

A yellow and Black capsule

Taken at bedtime with a cup of warm cocoa

My thoughts are confused

Tossed this way and that

Bouncing endlessly and noisily from the walls of my aching skull.

Like a solitary grain of sand on a pebble shore.

My body is an island

Cut off from the world

By oceans of fear that break relentlessly upon my shore

Eroding my yesterdays and drowning my tomorrows.

My life is a little yellow pill

And the bottle is nearly empty.

© Bri 1977/2005

At the Day Hospital we were asked to do something creative for public display on World Mental Health Day. I had not long learned that I was now considered to have “bi-polar disorder”. Undiagnosed till then because I am never as manic as most during the time before the depression closes in, and my time in that “manic” phase is relatively short, damaging just me and my relationships.

This is one of a pair I wrote for World Mental Health Day. The other is possibly too negative to put here where I cannot know who will read it. Written to illustrate the light and shade of living with depression, this is the light.

In Good Company.

I am a loony from the bin

Society puts its rejects in.

You’ve read about me in the Sun or Mail,

Where the headline without fail,

Will warn you that you might get stabbed,

Or even have your children grabbed,

By me, or others of my kind,

Who you will inevitably find,

Asleep in doorways, scrounging money,

To spend on booze or dogs with runny

eyes, that we appear to keep,

Rendering our poverty obsolete,

They’d rather us you did not see,

My other loony friends and me

They claim the life we live we choose

Our smelly clothes, our worn out shoes

Our confused speech, our confused minds

Fuelled by drugs we somehow find

Regardless of our lack of dosh

We’d clearly rather “trip” than nosh.

Winston Churchill, Lady Di

Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Ives

Spencer Tracy, Kurt Cobain

Michelangelo and Mark Twain,

John Lennon, Vincent Van Gogh

Gustav Holst, Rachmaninoff,

Tennessee Williams, Graham Greene,

All people you might not have seen

If judged on their illness alone

By the editor of some tabloid tome.

I am a funny from the farm

I promise I won’t do you harm

Some of us might, that is true

But statistically so might more of you

I’ve never robbed, I’ve never killed

Believe me, I am much too ill

Like many from the funny farm

It’s me, not you, who I might harm

And during times when I am well

You would not know, you could not tell

I’ve raised my children, stayed in work

Social responsibility I’ve not shirked

I work hard to avoid that bin

Society puts its rejects in

But this illness descends without warning

Fine at bedtime, nuts in the morning

If we frighten you, then you should see

Just how scared we are, my friends and me

And if at times we slur our speech

It’s drugs from the medics, not drugs from the streets.

Mary Shelley and John Keats

Virginia Woolf, Louis MacNiece

Ernest Hemmingway, Henrik Ibsen

Marilyn Monroe, Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Charlie Parker, Anton Bruckner,

Sylvia Plath and Edward Elgar

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James,

All these and many other names,

Might not be known to you and me

If their madness alone the world did see.

I am a nut without a case

You’d never know it from my face

I’ve trained my countenance to hide

The torment raging deep inside

If I seem ignorant when you ask

Please realise that the simplest task

Can seem immense at times like these

I’m standing, but I’m on my knees

It’s not your pity that I seek

Just understanding that this week

I might not be the man you know

I’ve lost me too, and now I’m so

Confused, bewildered, “off my head”

Contemplating being dead

The internal argument ensues

Could the loss of me be the making of you

While all that I ever achieved

Crumbles to nothing at times like these

And deep inside I’m forced to face

The truth. - I’m a nut without a case.

Charles Dickens, John Bunyan and George Fredrick Handel

Audrey Hepburn, Judy Garland and Gerard de Nerval,

Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Edgar Alan Poe,

Spike Milligan, Cole Porter and Victor Hugo

T.S Eliot, Brian Wilson, and Alfred Lord Tennyson

Charlie Mingus, Lord Byron and Emily Dickinson

Noel Coward, Samuel Johnson, and Monticelli

All shared the illness with people like me,

This world would be a less cultured place

If they’d hounded these humans out of the race.

I’m round the bend, I’m up the creek

Without a paddle in a boat that leaks.

A political pawn who lives with social rejection

Until the next general election

When headlines scream that folks like me

Are never safe, should not be free,

And if you weaken, are not sure

They’ll ask if you want us living next door

They’ll jumble several diagnosis

To arrive at a Jekyll and Hyde prognosis

To fuel the fear in folks like you

That you can never tell what we might do

You’ll have to search very hard to find

That Schizophrenia just means “confused mind”

That those with the fictional “split personality”

Are folks with depression, people like me

But the “split” in us is not “good” or “bad”

It is loss of control of what’s happy or sad

It means loss of our jobs, children, husbands and wives

It means loss of the love that we once had for life.

I am a loony from the bin

that society puts its rejects in.

Like many from the funny farm

It’s me, not you, who I might harm,

It’s not your pity that I seek,

Just understanding that this week

I might not be the man you know. . . . . . . but I’m in good company.

(c)  Bri 2005 (with “names” from www.mixednuts.net).

 

I think you will have gleaned by now that living with depression is littered with loss. Loss of self, loss of jobs, loss of friends, and, possibly worse of all, loss of significant relationships. It took me 6 years to recover from the loss of this one and to write this as a sort of therapy. The names have been changed etc. Etc.

Becky and Tom.

On days like these I miss you more

Than last month,

Last year,

The year before.

On days like these I speak to you,

Through all I think,

Or pray,

Or do.

On days like these I feel the pain,

Of yesterdays

Fresh

Once again.

On days like these I search to find

Your look

Your smell

From back of mind

On days like these I long to hear

Your voice

Emerging

Through my tears.

And how are Becky and Tom?

© Bri 2001.

So, we move on from the isolation of mental illness to the isolation of physical incapacity. I was 48 in 1998 when I learned that the excruciating pain in my buttocks and legs that had rendered me immobile was Degenerative Disc Disease. I was told my back was as worn as that of an 80 year old, and that the available surgical treatment would remove my mobility completely. Basically, the discs at the base of my spine are bursting and arthritis is moving in and compressing my spinal cord and some pretty important nerves.

Once I lose the use of my legs completely they will perform the operation, nothing to lose then, lol.

My condition is partially relieved by steroid injections and top of the range pain-killers but the pain is never completely supressed. Two discs were gone at the time of that first scan, a third went in 2004 and another in 2006, since then my mobility has declined so much that I became overweight and became diabetic. Anyway, that third occurrence led to more lifestyle changes than the others, the poem below describes an event at that time.

Freedom

With the freedom of a child re-grown

Today I took a bath alone

Free from fear, without a care

Into the tub with no-one there

I even reached my distant feet

With the help of my new plastic seat

And with waste still running to the drain

I filled it up and went again.

The plastic seat rides up and down

(Not far enough for me to drown)

So I no longer need to shout

For help to come and get me out

No more floundering like a big beached Whale

I’m told my plastic seat can’t fail

It will refuse to take me down

If it can’t get me up again.

I have forgotten, just can’t tell

The last time that I felt this well

A time to reclaim some of the cost

To happiness when skills are lost

Freedom to choose when to lie and soak

With fags, the radio, Southern Comfort and Coke

To choose such moments on a whim

Without needing to bring my loved ones in.

No more wondering how I smell

I’ve not bathed, can others tell?

No more planning what to cook, specially fry

So the smell doesn’t linger on me for days

No more need to stand in the rain

So I’ll feel properly clean again

And no more odour of sweaty feet

I think I’ll like my plastic seat.

Sometimes I’d think back and I’d laugh

At the child who so resisted baths

Oh Brian if you’d only known

What awaited you once you had grown

But I’d think these thoughts with no regret

I’d rather remember and feel, than hide and forget

And with my plastic ride I’ll have such fun

Disability Nil, Brian One.

© Bri 2006

The copyright symbol denotes that I am the owner of this work. That said, I think all of these have been utilised by one teacher/trainer or another at some time. As they are mirrors on my life I like to control who has them. If you think any of these would help you or someone you know please contact me, you will not be refused.

brokenbrian2011