Moon picnics

There was a time we made predictions that in the year 2000 we'd be having picnics on the moon. Our technologies didn't match up to our dreams when we rang in the second millennium. The spread of paranoia about the so-called millennium bug is evidence of that in itself. Now I'm fitting together a forecast for 2020 when we'll not be able to spread our picnic blankets on the preferred ground because lunar rovers have pulled it all up, and I can't see the Great Wall from here (maybe it's a new pair of spectacles I need, I haven't had a prescription filled for five years, I remember I got these in 2015 in Specsavers, when I used to get those ocular migraines, remember?). But you can see Berlin and where it's split to east and west. On one side, the lights all glow brilliant white. The other is dimmer, yellowing, almost like an old light bulb about to break. Look very careful at the black spot in the middle and you can see the park where Christiane F was turning tricks to get her next heroin fix. Thinking of earth-bound things like that, I feel the ground again, and that's a good feeling when I've been on the moon awhile and I'm starting to miss the stillness that comes with a greater gravitational pull.

the summarised diary of a fictional slightly heartbroken bitter-sweet-mouth person

date in   J a n u a r y

Three years, one after the other, I asked myself the same question.
I asked myself who it is I want to be. Three years ago, I wrote down in my notebook that I wanted to be the one. The year after that, I wanted to be the one that got away. This year, I want to get away.

date in  F e b r u a r y

I have dreams about waking up. Last night I dreamt I woke up wearing his face.

date in  M a r c h

Supposedly it's too early to be philosophising, but today I still hope to see my shadow prove to me I'm a whole and real person.

date in  A p r i l 

This morning there was a damaged boy in my bed. One I remember from months ago, when I was alone and wanted to be wanted, not even wanted, just accepted, then and then and then, in those moments. I don't remember how he got here but I guess I must be feeling the same. Need to be here, here and here. Except that I don't need to be here. I just need what I can't have.

s u m m e r 

Months we don't speak of, now we don't speak.

date in  A u g u s t

Time clings like cat hair and days are arbitrary smudges of light on the darkness that drops with night's fallings. My fingernails are cracked with good intentions but I can't find meaning in anything. Today on my walk home from work I found some old maps from pre-war London someone had lfet on the side of the road, near the drain where leaves are collecting. They remind me of body bags pulled up into banks that part for the cars to gleam through. I spread the maps out on my floor at home and traced the tiny roads with my fingers, pressing stickers onto places I remembered from when we used to take our adventures on the trains I was so afraid of taking before I met him.

 date in  S e p t e m b e r

I'm the only one at work who wears a long-sleeved uniform.

date in  O c t o b e r 

A storm last night split the sky open. It looks like the back of the moon. There are no apples in the fruit bowl, no milk in the fridge. I'm lonely but for the birds that still come even though I broke the bird table he built.

date in  N o v e m b e r 


Someone today thought that I was their old friend. I was stopped on the street by a woman perhaps in her late fifties. She had the kindest eyes, and they were greener than summer leaf, and they were so warm I could have heated my hands on them. I had to let her hug me before I forced out a laugh and said to her that I didn't know what she meant, that I probably wasn't who she was looking for. When she let go of me, I heard myself crying from the inside out. I heard the voices again, those that come from somewhere between my bones and all over, but under, and when she walked away I wanted to run after her. I went home and didn't cry, just watered the plants and watched the news.

date in  D e c e m b e r 
 
Christmas television crackling, hard folded bedsheets, night quiet and heavy at the window, looking in. It doesn't see me.

date in the  N e w  Y e a r 

This year, I want nothing from anyone.

Untender nights

Tenderness is a habit.
Tenderness is just a habit and we’re unlearning everyday.
There are darker things than the nights I am always running from
angrily leering in the periphery of my eyes
and I am too scared to stop running, too scared and yet
not blissfully ignorant enough to be blind to the denial I am in.
It’s an awkward place to be inside when you know wholly where you are
and also have no desire to get out.
The periphery is a meeting place of two absences.

Books left untouched for too long start to emit a low moan.
Another busted light bulb and the circles are round, they have no end,
that’s how long I want you to be my friend, again,
and to take care of me
and fix the circuits  in here
and in here.
The dreams I don’t sleep enough to let recur
murmur to me from the vents between my cortices
and the thoughts that build up through the little hours
and block their circulation-
cut off your hands,
nobody will hold them anyway.

I pretended not to hear until I wrote this down
 and now I'm cowering.
A circle’s round, it has no end,
a circle’s round, it has no end.
Everything has end. Even infinity because,
 in actuality, the universe ends,
reports the New Scientist. I can’t run forever,
it has to all end somewhere.

Using google translate, I put the above text through several diferent languages and back to English. I got this: 

There is not a night's nights' soft soft

Sensitivity is usually only and give us every day.There are darker things that always run at nightLooking angrily near the eyeI'm afraid to stop driving, very scared afterBlissful ignorant enough not to be blind to deny that I am.An unpleasant place to be if you know exactly where you areI also want to leave.The circumference of a meeting of two absences.
Immune written since the beginning of the long version whine.The second circle around the bulb explosion, not the end,This is the time I want to be my friend againAnd take care of meAnd the appointment of a community hereAnd here.Dreams do not sleep enough to stop the repeatTell me, my cracks in the crustAnd ideas to build up the hoursAnd prevent the movementAmputation of handsNo one will be anyway.
I did, as if he had not heard before, I wroteAnd now I'm intimidated.Ring around not overVisit the hand is over.This is the end. Because even infinite,
 Actually ends of the universe,The New Scientist. I can not run forever,Everything has to stop somewhere.

Musical perfection

A fairly recent discussion about songs that exempify musical perfection prompted me to procrastinate when nearly at the end of my essay (not even surel it's relevant without degree, probably) and give my idea of the songs that are perfect:

Baba O'Reily- The Who
Re: Stacks- Bon Iver
Nothing Compares 2 U- Sinead O'Connor
Perfect Day- Lou Reed
Feel- Robbie Williams
Old Friends- Simon and Garfunkeyu
America- Razorlight
Romeo and Juliet- Dire Straits


more coming soon, not in that order

an account of last year found in the poetry that was written during

January is folded neatly like my mother taught me,
life’s dirty laundry, she left the rest to the housekeeper,
we failed to clean it, the dirt got in deeper.
February and like you I why: when even scrambled I’m get me you
March and I have finally stopped burning bridges that are not yet
done being built and will let all that is meant to be (or not)
sink softly into the silt
April is overburdened on both sides, the extremist can’t
keep up either and simply snaps
May is where dreams come from- the deepest part of your
chest cavity, the sorest part of my throat, behind aching knees,
in my lungs, under our tongues
June & there are better ways to leave than through the skylight
or the heart/window
July and i am becoming, i am becoming, i am becoming,
empty sonnet, rolling static, sun splinters and
the spiders scatter
August, because- don’t leave me behind, don’t forget about me
don’t replace me, don’t hold this against me,
don’t ever say these things aloud because my mother taught me.
September sees sometimes the break in your heart is more like
the hole in the flute, sometimes it’s the place where the music
comes through and it came through for me when I most needed it to
October and we took the underground train home because we thought
to stop at the museum of natural history would turn habits and
thoughts that are old into to fossils, turn fools into gold,
November is dicing together my fragmentary thoughts on the
fridge door, when I play guitar, it creaks like it's dying
and I start crying.
December so I check my quiet corners for signs of you.
I check my poems for signs of wounds.

Will's new recording equipment put to use

A short poem recited using Will's exciting new mics and mixer.

Kicks

Kicks was a rare find- he was one of those guys who looked good with bleached hair or with specatcles on or with a ring in one of his earlobes. We weren't sure whether or not he actually was a student like us, but we had heard about Louis' roomate who had looked like the kind of guy who would kill kittens and carry a pocketknife to terrorise council-estate kids for the hell of it, and anyway, he didn't make it past the first few weeks. Rumours went around that he broke down crying in a seminar and confessed that he was cooking meth but they were only rumours and rumours could get pretty far fetched, flung even further the more people believed them. Louis took him in after the kitten-killer dropped out and after that Kicks was often at parties. He drank a lot but never got noisy or boorish. He didn't speak, ever, even when we asked if he wanted to play a song, or how old he was. Instead he'd shrug, nod, occasionally smile. He had big lips and small eyes, a delicate nose. He got his name from one of the first parties of the second term. In the middle of the dancefloor, he was jolting around in time with the music and he looked like broken china, his legs and arms loosely attached to the rest of him. From that kicking about, and because so few people knew was his name really was, he picked up the name Kicks. We never knew whether or not he liked it, but he never complained about it. He was funny, laid-back. It was a shame there weren't more guys like that.

Robbie told me that her real name was actually Esther. He was in a small class with her on Tuesday mornings, one that only contained seven students or so. We wouldn't have known it because she introduced herself and Joan and wanted everyone to know her like that. At parties she had this trick that some people were fascinated by, some people hated, but either way, everyone had something to say. She liked that- having an audience. She'd tell people she was Joan of Arc reincarnated and as if to prove it she would put cigarettes out on the crook of her white blistered arm. I remember people gathering round her one time when people were having drinks on the fourth floor of Robbie and Charlie's residential halls. 'When I died the first time,' I heard her say, 'I became fire-proof.' She took the roll-up George was smoking and before he could stop to protest- if he intended to, for he might have been more interested in the act she was performing- she pressed it into the inside of her elbow. It was a bit like I'd imagine watching a junkie shoot up. She tossed her head back, her skin seeming to glow luminescent with all the attention she was getting. She loved it all- people rolling their eyes, muttering, trying to turn away, staring at her scabs.

Kicks was the only one who wasn't apprehensive about Joan. Because he wasn't frightened by her, she tried even harder to frighten him. She went so crazy that we were't sure whether she really had lost her mind for good, and not in a party-trick way, because she would yell and yell until it didn't sound like anything and say strange things like that he was too clean to sleep in her bed or that she'd had a vision from God telling her to cut off his fingers. When she kissed him, it was wild and all for show, almost violent. Kicks didn't seem to mind. He didn't say anything about it, but I guess he never said much about anything.

George told us that she'd taken a fall trying to climb down the building from Kicks' bedroom. Some people said she deserved it, that it was coming to her. Others said that she was having another vision, hallucination, whatever, and she jumped. Kicks stopped dancing like a marionette with fractured limbs and when we saw him at parties he always left early, as if he wanted to be polite. I sort of hated Joan for swallowing him whole like that. I thought she'd always wanted to prove that he wasn't as laid-back as he seemed, and she'd succeeded, but now everything was bitten-lip and sidelong-glance and hesitant, awkward. It wasn't long before Louis wasn't happy and Kicks wasn't around anymore and nobody remembered what it was like when he had been so it didn't matter much anyway. a

She entered the bedroom late but unhurried. After scrubbing some of the filth accumulated from sleepless earth-worn crusading off her face and and from beneath her nails with the wash cloth and manicure brush at the sink, she slipped into bed beside him. Her arms fell atop his. He remained asleep, still. She began to whisper all her celestial wishes, telling of how they could only come alive with him. Travelling alone only led to tired paths and stretched wounds and echoes of antique voices, promising only the events as far ahead in time as the months and recent years just passed. Reading the news from headlines that were already being recycled into news nobody could prepare for.
Into the darkness, she voiced the new doubts she'd uncovered in the corners of yesterdays where she'd looked for answers and antecedents and other loose ends with which to tie her own, thinking her audience too faraway in sleep to hear-
Did you ever love me?
He replied to her from the dark and the sound of his voice was too present to echo.
I loved you in sleep. You never left me there.

contents pages

I. An introduction to alcoholism

II. A history of alcohol consumption and addiction

III. Identifying addiction 

i) Early signs of alcoholism

ii) Physical symptoms

iii) Psychiatric symptoms

IV. The causes of addiction: theoretical perspectives 

i) Psychosocial causes

ii) Genetic variation

iii) Neurological approaches 

V. Diagnosing alcoholism.

VI. Treating alcoholism 

i) Rehabilitation 

ii) Detoxification

iii) Psychological treatments

iv) Medications

VII. Prognosis for alcoholism

VIII. Current research into alcoholism

IX. Helplines and useful links

I. Foreword

II. The Psychology of Communication: Seven essays

1) Face-to-Face

2) Telephone Etiquette

3) Body Language

4) The Written Word

5) Innuendo, Implication and In-Between-the-Lines

6) Speaking in Public and Public Speaking

7) The Psychology of Silence 

III. Afterword 

I. An introduction to humanism

II. The history of humanism

i) Predecessors across the globe

ii) Renaissance humanism

iii) 18th-19th century to modern humanism

III. Types of humanism

i) Renaissance

ii) Secular

iii) Religious

IV. Anti-humanist humanism: the paradoxical polemics  about humanism

V, Humanistic psychology

I. Memory: an introduction to the study of memory

II. Long-term and short-term memory

III) Models of short and long-term memory

- Atkinson-Shiffrin's Multi-Store Model

- Baddley and Hitch's Working Memory Model

- Research to corroborate and contradict

IV. Types of memory

i) Declarative memory (explicit) 

- episodic memory

- semantic memory 

ii) Procedural memory (implicit)

V. Forgetting

i) decay

ii) interference

VI. The neurobiology of memory

VIII. Disorders affecting memory

IX. Levels of processing: improving memory

X. Other types of memory

i) flashbulb memory

ii) topographical memory 

XI. False memories

X. Current issues in memory research 

XI. Conclusions

A story

The sky was split open and tumbling, crude and grey and yellow. It looked like the back of the moon. Everything shone and we could hear the war. I thought about everything burning.

There wasn't any dreaming that night, only nightingale song we couldn't hear, storm clouds spun the colour of lillies and the bruises that made an atlas of my arms and legs, and rainwater collecting in the gutter that we couldn't be trusted with. I couldn't sleep again and spent most of the night twisting the bedsheets into rugs and curtains so that I could live with myself. He woke a few hours before daybreak and I asked him to teach me how to sleep but he knew that I didn't learn anything that way so instead he told me bedtime stories. The one about the fairytale lion chasing old souls and big roots across oceans and down to the middle of the earth where they intertwine like hydrangea vines. Whole armies and navies buried with their glasses on because some people believe that death is a sleep that ends in the sky.

The next day came as promised and we didn't waste time. We got into his car and drove until we hit a wall of stars. The summer heat knew us. It simmered around us, connecting us to the great men in history We play a game I made up that involves picking our favourite words out of the poetry anthology I carry in my satchel wherever I go, and fashioning crowns out of them. Our laughter snowballed as the sun rose higher above the blue car. There was only one other car as far as we could see. Muffled drums, cracked bells. The car couldn't go as fast as ours. I didn't think we were laughing at the same thing.

We thought of as many words as we could to describe distnace. Because of the sun, his hair grew lighter and his skin darker; I was sure that at any moment he could disappear.

It began to rain so we stopped on the side of the road. "It never rains here does it?"
"No." We stayed. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a hardcover book on ancient cartography. I used my poetry anthology . Receipts and a clean paper napkin fluttered out of his book when he opened it, stepped out of the car, holding it over his head. Rain looked nice on him. He became the song playing inside the car. I don't remember it but I think it was good.

It looked no different from outside the blue car than from the inside. "Why was that in your glove compartment?"  The book was soaked. We took to leaning against the car and staring at invisible things.  He whistled; it was grating. The way he was talking in the rain was more like biting.  After a while I climbed into the car and he follows me in, tossing his book into the backseat, absolutely ruined. There had been a brief inscription in the front cover but it was entirely indecipherable then.

We drove on some, until we were at the edge of the city. Beauty and light and noise are all the same thing and they are fulsome.  We left the car in someone's driveway as there was no parking outside the diner we wanted to go into. My dress was damp from the rain, and time was getting on and we hadn't transformed yet as we'd agreed we would. There was hardly any light inside. We sat in a booth much too large but perfectly secluded and I ordered pancakes, nothing on them, while he orders a sandwich with grilled cheese The waitress was bleary-eyed and unfazed when she brought us over cups of tea and a jug of tap water. He requested some lemon and ignored the strange look he received in exchange, concentrating instead on arranging the sugar pots and cutlery nicely on the tapble I was beginning to fall asleep so held onto his arm tightly and told him to keep me awake, I wanted the pancakes. To pick myself up with false energy, I slipped to the ladies room, where the inside made me look wily, or like I was sickening for something.

For a small moment, we sat there, just breathing. "Did you ever think about how your possessions will outlive you, like shoes and stuff." He didn’t really ask it, because he knew I wouldn’t say anything. "You can’t go to sleep, we are talking and the pancakes aren’t here and you might have a nightmare and I don’t know how to deal with that sort of thing."

He disappeared for a while and returned when his grilled cheese arrived, smelling of cigarettes and something else, I felt my thoughts thinning and he pushed his plate aside, the food mostly untouched, making space to lie beside me. Whispers, loud and obtrusive, were exchanged. Even the hearts in my heart were fatigued. He said that he felt set apart from me forever, especially after today. He said he felt afraid.

The next morning I woke up in his room to a quiet expanse of excess. The thick folds of sad light that had been coating everything had been pulled back. I looked at my forearms and saw that the bruises that yesterday still made maps of my skin had faded, leaving me pale and blossom pink.

"Is the war over?" I asked him, half-sitting when he came in. The room smelt of coffee and the Carpenters song 'Close To You' was playing on a loop from his record player.

"No. Why?"

"Everything feels happy."

He left because he had a job interview and I stayed for a while to write down some words I dreamt about. I didn't like myself for stealing paper, so I put the words on the refrigerator. There was a photograph pinned up of a pearly moon; it was poignant but I didn't like it.

There's not much point in trying to speak my mind, anyway.

You've already made up yours about the words you'll hear me say. 

No matter which words I'd like to use, I haven't got a choice.

I can't figure out if I lost it or it was you who stole my voice. 

Cross Poems

Why you should forget everything you have learnt about Knut Hamsun and other poets with work published in the second edition of Modern Poetry Volume VII

At  fifteen I stopped scowling,
 all worked up, my nerves being irritated
by close of day.
Hopelessly in love,
we have not met like this in a long time,
the expressions of the cobblestones
uncertain, stumbling,
staring continuously at the floor,
so as not to be distracted by Idleness,
buttoning his uniform.

What the government doesn't want you to know about Knausdgaard and Fitzgerald

There had been a war fought and won and indulged in,
all costs inexplicable but almost chemical.
We continued to play, but such an old town for rumours
while the sun was setting on the horizon was in my mouth
and inexplicable things happening had
already littered my mind

Poems revisited

Writing the article about psychosis I touched on the topic of the value of things that are not evaluated by others but valuable to you purely because you find them to be of value. I mentioned that there are poems I have written that I find to be the most valuable or, in my opinhouion, are more worthy of a read, but that others do not consider them to be of greatre value. I realised though that there are poems other people have said are their favourites of what I've written (always great to hear) that I

  the ) didn't think of that way. I thought I'd put some links here so I can revisit these old poems.

Sleeps (published poem)

Starshatter (Ella's favourite)

Sorry For Your Loss Isn't Right (my mother's favourite)

Flower Beds (my grandma's favourite)

Mirror(Me) (a personal favourite, Luke's favourite)

Kristallnact (one of William's favourite)

Dial Tone (my sister's favourite)

Letters to former Daisys (Hellopoetry.com's favourite with 1,3000 reads- yay)

Psychosis

Voice 1: Why? How do I get rid of you?
Voice 2: To get rid of us you have to get rid of yourself.
Voice 3: If anyone knew what was going on in your head…
Voice 4: Look who’s really crazy now?
Voice 5: Help me.

My mother said in an email, ‘You’re right. Most people don’t know what happened to you with Ella’s death.’ I haven’t cried such tears of relief, ever. After the worst of it was over, I did not know enough to cry tears of relief because I was so busy gathering scraps of my sanity back. That sounds like a cliche or a silly metaphor and I promised myself I wouldn’t use those when writing this because I wanted to explain my experience with psychosis clearly and factually- this also will mean attempting to commuincate the maddest and objectively nonsensical events with journalistic detachment enough to tell the full story without the elaboration of rhetorical devices and other linguistic embellishments that I might usually use to evoke pathos and make for a better story. This isn’t a story. (Even that sounds like a device- or perhaps I’ve been sunk too deep in my latest read, Elements of Eloquence, learning about epistrophe, litotes, zeugma, hypozeuxis, antanaclasis, epizeuxis and catachresis- I like how that all sounds complicated but is actually super fun and interesting). Anyway, inaniloquent as ever, I will begin my explanation of what really did happen that left me gathering sanity scraps. This silly image is annoyingly as accurate as language gets to depict how I felt after the initial implied the destructive event that was the scattering agent. It was my mind, once intact, now unrecognisable, and in pieces that wouldn’t work cohesively unless I found new ways to assemble them, and assemble myself all over again, and in doing so reassembled an entire person out of the wreckage of somehow who, though supposedly before, was also unrecognisable.

For a while, I experienced what my doctors explained was a ‘transient episode of psychosis as response to extreme emotional stress’. I had no sense of self as soon as it began, because prior to the episode I had put so much emphasis on the importance of my mind. ‘It’s my most treasured possession’ I would say, and in the most horrific hours I would be taunted by my own cackles at just how funny it was, how I’d practically asked for it because that treasured mind of mine was now gone.

Voice 1: I don’t want my body.
Voice 2: I want my mind.
Voice 3: Your mind is a long way-away-away-away-away…..

Doctors had recently diagnosed me with Borderline Personality Disorder and I had been reluctant to fully accept this diagnostic label until they explained that transient psychosis is actually symptomatic of BPD. I will never be able to credit my therapists and doctors enough for their endless reassurance that I had not lost my mind, that it would come back, and that there was an end to what was happening. What I’d read was never in-depth, despite being a psychology graduate. Just textbook and impersonal. The truth is, if you know me well, you have probably played a part in my psychosis. If I passed you on the street, I may have heard you think. The voices were the main part- the worst part and something I could never live with permanently. I made a pact to myself and some god who I thought might resemble Allen Ginsberg (sanity = scraps) that if it continued as acutely as it was at its worst, as it was then, for three more days without improving, I would wilfully end my life. Looking back with sane eyes, I stand by that statement. If someone told me I’d have to return there, and stay, I would without a doubt end my life. Not because I’m suicidal or sad. The contrary, in fact. Because I love living and I am grateful for the mind I’ve grown up to have, and the idea of living a life without my mind wouldn’t be the kind of life I’d feel worth living. Everything I value would be gone. Everything I found valuable about living life wouldn’t be there anymore so life would henceforth have no value so I can say, totally sane and sober, that I wouldn’t find it a worthwhile thing to do. To live in psychosis that horrific. Thankfully it got better gradually, and now I don’t regret that time. I took to it eventually the same way I do everything bad that happens in hindsight- you have to find some good in it, some way to make it worthwhile, or else it was a waste and there’s not much worse than wasted time spent suffering with no reason or nothing to come away with or nothing to balance it out again. The reason I am doing my degree is to one day to train as a psychotherapist and use my experience (bad time) of being mentally ill, in institutions and out of school and spending my adolescent years as anything but an adolescent but as a monster, to help people who are also going through it- it’s very delicate and very lonely and very varied between individuals, but through my time in group therapy I learnt that for all the other things I lack in every other realm of life, I do have one strength and that’s understanding and listening and somehow finding the important parts that are hidden away in what the person decides to share, and somehow saying helpful stuff. I don’t know, I don’t like to pay myself a compliment or talk about my strength in whatever or blah blah blah, but what I mean is that I don’t judge because I cant- because I’ve been the one who has been judged and if I were to do that, how would I have a leg to stand on? I also think that there are people who aren’t listened to or find it harder to speak than most or have no one to talk to, and that these are the people worth listening to, and giving extra time to hearing, and even if they’re just talking or yelling, being there to listen is so incredibly important. So that’s how I’ve planned to balance out the bad with something better, and make something good (my career and helping somehow) out of something bad (which I wouldn’t know I could do if I hadn’t been through the bad). And then there’s the everyday bad stuff- all you can do with that really, is learn lessons. And learning from mistakes isn’t necessarily about making the mistakes and never making them again. Sometimes it’s about repeating the same mistake and learning more about how you want to live or what you want to become or how to treat other people each time you make it. When it’s enough, you’re not mistaken anymore. The psychosis was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s also probably the thing (no, definitely) I’m most proud of going through. No one will ever give me a cheer or a pat on the back or congratulate me for battling a war with my own shadow and winning. I have to be proud of what I’ve done totally on my own, and I thank my fucked up little patched-together brain for teaching me through utterly going to pieces and only being reassembled to function with endless painstaking almost excruciating (no, excruciating) effort and time and working against horrible forces that only existed inside of me- invisible enemies only I could see because they were a part of me and still are- that sometimes the greatest things you’ll do aren’t about being evaluated by other people. I’ve learnt there are some victories you can enjoy even if nobody will cheer for you and there are some accomplishments that only you will be able to appreciate, and that is not a bad thing. I also extrapolated it to things like writing. I love to write, but not because other people read it. I write things for myself and I can evaluate myself and don’t need to rely on positive evaluations from other people to keep me writing. Some of my favourite poems are ones that others don’t notice, or don’t as much as other ones I don’t like as much. That is totally cool. With writing and everything else, I’m the only one it really matters to anyway, when it comes down to it. Nobody else’s memories or mental representations of me will hold any importance at the end of everything, so why is it that we only find value in accomplishments we can be awarded or congratulated for or at least seen to achieve? I based all my self-worth on accolades other people gave me before this.

Now I can weirdly, proudly, semi-cryptically, and strangely say without the least bit of genuine profundity that I fought the demons and voices my own split evil brain created for me after throwing me into a Kafkaesque horror carnival parody movie-like hell, and I beat them by outwitting them
(You can only beat your own mind with your own mind) and it’s the best thing I’ve ever accomplished. The least enjoyable. I’m feeling a bit sick now after blowing my own trumpet like that. Back to the voices.

I heard mostly my own voice, but fragmented into many different Daisys. It began with family’s voices.

My sister and her boyfriend, my cousin, my grandma, aunt, other cousins, and mother. I remember sitting in A&E waiting room and hearing my sister sitting behind me, mocking me cruelly, and her voice was so clear and plain I was paralysed and couldn’t turn round because I thought- if she’s behind me, she’s actually saying this, if she’s not my mind is gone. I couldn’t turn around. I heard a suicide pact between my grandma and cousin, debating whether or not to include me but eventually deciding my new hair colour was okay and I was too cowardly anyway and they didn’t want me in their afterlife. I heard stranger’s thoughts for one totally mad day. That’s a whole other story I may make into a song or small movie because it was packed full of what now I recall as insanity as art-

my brain going off on wild loops rhapsodising poems without my consent, speaking in dialects, letting me in on the voices of social realisms I didn’t even know I was aware of,

but apparently these issues were thoroughly considered beneath my level of awareness in my unconscious mind. My unconscious mind was split from me, it was angry, it got powerful the more scared I became, and it hated me. It had it in for me and wanted me to die.

It told me I had to end my life if I wanted the voices to go away. They told me I could save my cousin through suicide. When you’re sad, you can get very superstitious.

But I’m so lucky I never quite believed the voices totally. If I had I wouldn’t be here to talk about it. I knew from the start, perhaps because the nature of the voices and my unconscious mind with all the tricks it played on me was purely and exclusively Machiavellian, that they weren’t words I could believe or trust, if I wanted to get out of it alive (no hyperbole), and if I wanted a future. It’s amazing to think I stuck by this, even though my own thoughts were actually speaking to me. It’s very hard to tell yourself not to trust the things you find inside your own head. Usually you assume your thoughts are your own and therefore true to you. I had to continuously believe that my mind was not to my own- the things I heard were not my thoughts. Often they were the things, I discovered, that I was afraid of thinking or feeling, or afraid that other people thought I felt or thought, or the things that I absolutely did not believe or think or feel. Through fighting continuously with my true thoughts and beliefs to deny my evil split brain and its horrible voices the right to be validated as anything but hallucinations and a form of terrorism, I actually came out with stronger values and opinions and more firm in my knowledge of certain things I was not and am not willing to negotiate on (e.g. I am not sorry to my father, and I am not okay with what happened when I was seventeen because I did not ask for it).

I would see things and hear things and the world became inescapably violent and unpredictable and it grew impossible to maintain a façade of sanity whilst existing inside it all.

One evening I rang my mother in tears, convinced the voices were going to get me alone in the house, and she said, “At least you know it’s all in your head.” Those were the least comforting words, though spoken with good intentions. I had never felt more alone and there was nobody there to see the demonic things I couldn’t not see, nobody to hear the chilling voices I couldn’t not listen to.
I’m getting a bit carried away with my storytelling now. Better reign it in and stick to the facts.

Once I to shrieked upon entering a room because there was the face of an elderly woman peeled off and draped over the sofa. It was, in reality, a pink scarf, but I had developed an over-zealous aptitude for seeing faces in everything and everywhere.

I didn't have to look for faces. They were there ready so frighten me with their distorted countenances, to watch me, to exist in every inanimate object until the world was a room filled with furniture that hated me. It sounds ridiculous, but it wasn't funny and I was losing my treasured mind to scowling sofas and disembodied voices- myself at various ages, with exaggerated tones, taking on different roles, creating an ongoing, sleepless theatre for my fragmented selves to perform for me (sometimes in song, even) all the reasons they were hell-bent on destroying me or getting me to do it myself.

My evil unconscious mind, somewhat ingenious despite being Machiavellian- would jump into speakers and amplifiers on tube and in supermarkets and broadcast across whole shop/train carriage with my own voice saying, “Look what I can do.”

To cut a long harrowing story shorter, every voice was against me. I never heard a kind or even civil voice. I’d like to know people who have delusions of grandeur or hear complimentary voices because I never heard anything less than vicious, ranging from the annoying and belligerent to the belittling to the bullying to the cruel to the absolutely terrifying.

The least dreadful voice(s) were the last to go, and the ones that stayed latest at night, and the quietest. They were small voices asking ‘why?’ and saying ‘help me’. I heard ‘listen to me’.
It wasn't until I started listening to them that I began getting over them. I see them now as being the angry fragmented voices of the angry fragmented person I had stamped all over and dressed up in different identities and denied, denied, denied. The person I really was got so sick of being mistreated- I wasn't even drinking any fucking water or sleeping, that’s the extent to which I was denying and neglecting myself basic care without even thinking- that she got a voice, then she got more voices, then she got louder, then she went on a power trip to punish me for what a mess I’d made of whatever it was I organically was meant to be, by pretending to be a whole load of other things and never letting myself be happy and making people around me sad too. For what? No point asking. There are some things about our unconscious intentions I don’t think we’ll ever know, and that’s scary, but I was given the unique insight into my unconscious most people don’t get but in memories of dreaming and even though I'm grateful it was no gift and I wouldn't wish it upon people if their unconscious intentions are anything like mine- I learnt that underneath the workings of my waking conscious mind existed a mind that absolutely loathed everything about my waking conscious self and what I’d made of it and wanted to simply destroy it, and if it couldn’t then it would make as much suffering as possible so I couldn’t carry on the way I was consciously. It worked and I did change and however evil they were I am grateful to the voices for showing me I couldn’t hide from hatred and more-than-mistakes like that for very much longer.

The voices made me conscious of what I was doing, what I was afraid of really, what I was becoming, what I was losing, what I was missing out on that I could have but was so busy being wasteful and harmful and in denial that I couldn’t even see it was being wasted.

The voices began the day after I heard about my cousin Ella being terminally ill. My doctors think it was anticipatory grief and the aforementioned extreme emotional stress. I think it was a ticking bomb and it was looking for an opportunity, or else it was the straw that broke the sane camel’s back (dammit devices). I began to hear my family saying horrible things (made up in my head but very real as if a person were speaking to me from right beside me), and then my own voice saying worse things, and then it took months and months to get some peace of mind.

There is nothing I've experienced more terrifying than hearing a voice in your head you know did not come from the outside world but sounds like it did, but actually shocks you because it’s not your own thought.

Not an inner voice or imagined. A shocking, surprising, horrible thought in spoken word- a voice probably recognised- that you did not put there yourself and you do not want to be there.

I don't know if it was all  orchestrated like it happeneed because it actually perhaps in the long run was my own mind not out to get me but out to help me. It wasn't kindness through cruelty. It was more like myself getting its own back on myself for being wasteful of things I maybe should have said or could have given voice to but never did and for the wrong reasons, and getting revenge for being forced to fit into all kinds of costumes that weren't right, and as seems to be the way with me. From what I've learnt of myself through life- though I now am tentative about making such statements because I also gleaned this from going hough the whole psychotic rigmarole -
the moment you start getting complacent and thinking you know yourself, the moment you’ll get thrown a curve-ball that proves to you that you know absolutely nothing)

I didn't know limits and went a step or twelve hundred too far.

I’ll draw this circular story to a close now. I did just want to get it off my chest. I still hear mumblings now and then, if sad or tired to the extreme, and admittedly live in fear of my unconscious mind becoming unhinged again and getting its voice(s) back, but if it does happen again I know I’ll spend more time listening to what the voices have to tell me rather than running from the grotesque sounds and sights my own brain set out for me to hear and see, because they were there for a reason, and even though my unconscious mind went above and beyond to show me how much it hated me, I hope I’ve gained some of its respect back, at least enough to start talking in entirely the first person and continue on in my life as a whole person rather than the scraps of someone I don’t know and don’t care about enough to look after in the most basic way. Since the psychosis, I’ve been reluctantly able to accept that I am deserving (of water etc.) and sometimes need to be listened to, because there’s nothing to be that is ever going to work if its fiction and not fact. The scraps I’ve collected are structured day-to-day, moment-to-moment, and it can be ugly sometimes, because humans can be that way, but at least it’s honest. And my demanding unconscious evil split brain demands that I am honestly whatever I really am, however faulty and clumsy and ugly and riddled with glaring flaws that honest self really is. They are demanding little bitches, those voices. Still, whether they meant it all along or I somehow managed to salvage the tiny speck of good leftover from the hellish experience, those voices gave me insights and taught me lessons that have been invaluable, and though they destroyed me for a while what they destroyed was not a real self, just a costume, or many costumes, and in retrospect I see that they saved me, the real one, the invisible self disappearing under so many costumes I lost any recognition of who I really was.

 I guess I have to thank the worst parts of my mind for helping me rescue what can now become the best parts.

Impatiently I waited in expectation of the spark that once I may have been
but that may never have been there at all, quietly I waited to catch fire
Such impatience requires long night spent awake, dedicated to waiting.
(There is not only dedication in patience.)

Patiently I waited at windows, at the roadside, on trains, standing
on their platforms, counting them down. Patiently in waiting rooms
pleasantly I waited, arranging magazines, arranging my limbs
into casual, patient places. Impatient with my weight, I had been
so impatient to disappear. For years, I was a patient.
(Hospitals are dedicated to the well-being of their patients.)

I met you first when I needed to.
I met you second when I needed you.
I met you last night but I need you now.

(Repeat as needed).

Discuss

1. I wouldn't ask me that, if I were you.
2. Maybe I'll only stay a minute, because that is approximately the time it takes for me to feel uncomfortable, intimidated, inexplicably overwhelmed with irrational shyness that doesn't know where to put my hands or arrange my features so the sooner I'm alone with myself, the better. Maybe I'll stay longer, because I trust you, because you make me smile, because I want to be around you and when I am I don't feel that frightening shyness, I can use my hands and speak freely, and I'll stay because you are staying and I will stay as long as you let me. Then there are the places I always stay. I don't know whether it's because I don't know how to say goodbye or the things I stay for don't politely tell me it's time to leave. Sometimes they give me reasons to stay, but I only need one, and that's what it is that's worth staying for.
3. I'm not brutal, I'm not inanimate, I'm not built to kill the killers, and justice means little to me.
4. I prefer a charcoal-dust-pale-deep grey, I prefer the colour of thunder and realisation.
5. No, because I don't know where I'm going and the people that always stay and let me stay always can help me along the way to who I could be, can be, want to be. I'm not alone and neither are you.

Three Questions

What is it like to love somebody?  asks Gratitude.
It's like being brought to life in a flash of something brilliant
that didn't exist for you before, I answer.

What is it like to be loved in return? asks Happiness.
It's like being heard after a lifetime of never being able to speak,
being seen after a length of perpetual darkness, I answer.

What is it like to love and to lose? asks Sadness.
I take a long time thinking how to explain it but then
in the place of Sadness is Loneliness, with the same question.

It is like hearing every goodbye ever said to me,
all at once, is all I can come up with.

Loneliness doesn't linger like it used to,
and in front of me is a wall made entirely of window
letting in a flood of daylight and
Peace knocks gently at the door, no questions.

Look from the other side

Look in the mirror. 

You look like you've done something wrong

                              There's nothing wrong with you. You look okay. You are okay.

                                                                                            

Look.                                                                                        Look. 

You'd be better off smaller. 

                                               Someone, somewhere out there needs more of you.       .