Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever

Sixties Press, 2004

ISBN 1-902-731-04-2

Out of print

http://www.sixtiespress.co.uk/publications1.htm

Alan Morrison © 2004

Or, Confessions of an Absentee

i. Old Come Down

Think of this

as something of a mystery tour

on bumpy green-line bus suburban

drive down faceless roads that blur

as dissipated senses trapped

between vague dreams and sleep;

somewhere-else in time since sounds

of bus doors shushing open, shut,

brought you to plastic slashed seat here

on this thought-driven ghost bus…

Deeper, deeper, peeping in

from tether-ending to old beginning,

no option open for turning back

once you’re travelling silently here

on snaking grey to Windmill View,

pale as fellow passengers primed

for Phobiclinic disappointments…

Suburbia to phobia, in deep,

traipsing trains of thoughts disperse

and settle down in time, great healer,

red-faced doctor, portly plum

cosseted in nun-habit white coat

of peacock-puffed-up purpose,

needling pin-head beady eyes

into your vulnerable cerebral grey –

with stethoscope ears he’ll filter in

mostly what he decides to hear,

obscured by echoes he’s used to hearing…

…nearing that limbo place, old hat

therapy obtained through point systems -

bus pulls up by un-littered curbs

(no signs of life) of this uninhabited

suburb where troubled thoughts tumbleweed

about in search of sanctuary

in this unvisited territory –

the stop that beckons passengers’ stares:

only the troubled get off there….

ii. Obsessive-Confessive Disorder

Have you heard of OCD?

Three threatening letters spelling out

my disorder for me: O’s for Obsessive

I trace back to OHP-penned cant

scrawled on a projector screen…

I am the Lord of the Dance said he

and I’ll lead you all wherever you may be

and I’ll lead you all to the dance said he…

mind-pictures, images, jumbled-up inside

struggling to break free: a trip

down Memory Lane pulls up at polished

assembly floors, wood-bead rosaries,

Hail Mary-s, Holy Ghosties,

thoughts that go bump in the night…

Hail Mary-s, wooden beads, black sums,

one day the world will be ruled by numb-

-ers, numbers, numb bums

pressed on cold polished floor –

7 x Hail Mary-s Mothers of God,

Jesus and Holy Ghost: The Trinity

numbering Metaphysical x 3 –

subtraction, addition, multiplication,

transubstantiation, division:

deep irredeemable division in me…

Obsession: first introduced to me

as punishment for confessing too late

to something I didn’t do anyway

in form of writing out same line

a hundred and fifty times…

From the very beginning the tick of the clock.

The sound of a clock thinking.

From the very beginning the sound of my mind

ticking. Ceaselessly winding round

between hurdles of breathless minutes

dragging on the distance between stark numbers…

The clock slows down, thinking ticks fainter,

little saint in me first finds daylight

too fierce and bright to see school-dust

dancing in the shards from a hundred and fifty

infant skins flaking, dispersing,

drifting to mist of doubting ambiguity,

dandelion-clocking, tick-tocking away;

a swath of saffron incense, fog

of pollinating sin…

now his first silence descends on him

settling unshiftably like sediments of thought

at the bottom of morbidity

welded there on the pebble-bed;

silence smothering me, putting

its strong hand over my mouth,

refusing to let me breathe…

His lesson was very telling: some sense

inside-sense, in-sense, can’t be

expressed by speaking, this stifling

invisible silence restrains the lips

when they so wish to purge, confess

whatever’s on their numb tongue’s tip…

…can speaking get it out? flush it out

for good? or ill? weak will, weak will…

…as if some mental dentist numbed the whole

mouth (orison of the oyster soul)

with an injection of slow-working anaesthetic,

fitted the throbbing teeth with a brace,

swollen jowls, witless face,

unable to form any fathomable expression,

darkened by inexplicable sense impression,

sense of uncertainty seeping in

the infected gum, puss-green,

the little saint is teething: sins

pressing innumerably on his nerves,

pushing the wisdoms of innocence out

till the gums swell up with pallid burns…

all the time the clock-hand turns…

sense of sin burrows into the nerves,

poisons cavities, sours saliva,

coats the tongue with holy wafer

roof-of-the-mouth-parched rice-paper dryness…

the walls of the silenced mouth wear thin…

back to the beginning….

iii. English Martyrs RC School

First photo in school uniform, hapless snapshot,

papal red and popish white

of the English Martyrs Primary School tie;

cap pressed on halo of blond hair

hiding shy grey eyes, pink grin –

a bowed-down head, unsure half smile,

a true Little Father Time…

At this teething time something stirs inside

with the tired strain of rising early

out of bed unnaturally, un-rested,

time to be tested by the self, cold floors

for bare feet, hard outdoor shoes to suffocate toes,

dark school day mornings’ face oppressed

with black cloud brows bursting to tip

down, score monochrome rainbows…

grey and sepia, umber, beige,

muddy brown, puddle grey, black

I can’t see a rainbow

see a rainbow

only black black black…

face flannel rinse and wringing of spirits,

choke out the dreams to the snap, crackle, pop

of Corpus Crispies, or insulating glow

of Ready Brek’s fragile halo of homely

warmth, soon frozen to numbness in duty,

bottles of milk chilling out on the frosty

doorstep, silver top pierced by blackbirds,

jackdaws, straws: I burst into tears

at being forced to finish them, fits of sadness

at lunchtime, semolina tears, morbid

school thoughts, moon-faces and faraway trees’

brief spells of distraction, collect to inspire

a head full of maudlin into singing…

Raindrops keep falling on my head

now I’ve been woken up and dragged straight out of bed

nothing to be said, oh…

letting go of mother’s hand, so cold

in the visible chill of the morning…

I was so convinced she’d disappear

into ether one day without warning…

here darkness first set in; a sense

of an infinite, senseless, unfeeling, insensitive universe to which my sensitivity’s condemned,

oblivion-black as the asphalt playground

and breath-smoked running track, lost

to hop-scotch thoughts, skipping ropes,

trembling mental tightropes struggling

to come to terms; to cope…

let the panic wash over you…

Edwardian schoolgirl rhymes first sung

trillions of times ago to stamps

of laced boots hop-scotching beneath

billowing ice-white hems in wintry

school yards blow out their tributes

to keep up spirits of modern Emma-s,

Emily-s, Charlotte-s, Jane-s

clapping hands and chanting spells

to brush cobwebs of doubt away…

Eeny, meeny, macka, racka,

Rare, o, domino,

Ala-balla, jooba-lalla,

Hom, pom, flesh.

Ena, mena, macka, racka,

Rai, ri, domi, nacka,

Chika lolla, lolla poppa,

Wiz, bang, push.

Eany, meany, maca, raca,

Red rose, doma naca,

Ali Baba, suva naca,

Rum, tum, toosh

lollypopper, dominacker, om, pom, poosh…

push them out, push them out,

stamp feet, clap hands, out, out, out!

– Have a cigarette, sir?

– No, sir.

– Why, sir?

– Because I've got a cold, sir.

– Let me hear you cough, sir.

Very bad indeed, sir.

You ought to be in bed, sir.

Four and twenty bags sir,

Three blackbirds full sir -

Ba, ba, black sir -

O-U-T spells out, sir.

Ticking back the hands might point to my

time in hospital as the turn to decline,

a sharp pain in my appendix spelt

out you might not make the scouts,

a wolf cub struck out by Akela

stripped of his stitched-on badges for

felt-tip fingers and a stabbing stitch

precluding burst appendix…

I recalled my brother’s toddler tales

of The Lamp looming down on him in bed

and stealing all his sweeties, of his

calling out to a frizzy-haired mum

unlistening as a witch – but I

hadn’t had hallucinations before:

yet in that antiseptic-stinking ward

it was a dark age of constant night for

a scourge of daddy-long-legs covered

the sweaty windows, I’m sure…

With the subterfuge of being bullied

(the culprit being me) I lapsed

into the stigma of an absentee –

time for bohemian Mr. Davis

in his Willie Wonka ginger locks

and Rupert the Bear check trousers,

to come round before school, escort me

back to its plasticine purgatory, my

white knuckle thoughts and self-escape plots…

time to pull up my lamb-white socks…

Baa baa black sheep will you go to school?

No Miss, no Miss, no Miss Wool…

iv. What’s The Time Mister Wolf?

First sense of the sentence of homesickness

(predicted by predestined homebirdishness)

set in to the smell of tupperwear

sandwiches, plimsolls, banana skins,

hurdles – sense of being lost; elsewhere…

from the beginning the need to escape:

run out of class, turn hot-footed home

for the forbidden fruit-bowl moments

on the afternoon dining room table,

the option of early evenings and tea

warming the nauseous tummy –

right from the beginning the need to be free,

yet to fit in and to be on the safe un-delving

inside – C is for Compulsions, tempted

me into impulsive bids for breaking free;

fantasising, phantasmasising of fleeing

school, all the while the lessons droned

in/out my ears, my mind climbed out

and went AWOL back home…

fear of the self’s impulsivity….

fear of unconsciously selling soul

for security, certainty,

or of casting an irreversible spell by

simply thinking three simple words I still

can’t utter, can’t even write down

for superstitiousness, oh yes,

phasmaphobia you might say…

As a feverish child I’d sweat adrenalin

for fear of clumsily losing my soul,

selling it to Mister Scratch for no reason at all,

not in return for some princely sum

but simply because it could be done –

I even feared just thinking the lines

‘I sell my soul’ could secure the transaction;

no way to reverse it, no second chance,

destined to exist forever as a shell

for lack of something precious, invisible;

the only part of us truly irreplaceable.

First glimmers of the soul in me: what is it?

Alan, it’s time for tea…If my soul was me

then it was my soul I was most uncertain,

doubtful of, some sort of soulphobia…

school-phobia they categorised my symptoms as,

too sensitive to be, slowly prone to intrusive

thoughts (though aren’t all thoughts intrusive?); whereas most minds sieve in what they

wish to think, mine was honeycombed

with holes sealing themselves with a sense

of martyr-masochism; strove to keep

experiences in for no clear reason;

long, involuntary term of introspection,

onset of nerves – but didn’t we all have nerves?

Why do we say one suffers from nerves

when one has quite clearly lost them?

When I just couldn’t cope with the droll routine

of school, and stuck a finger down my throat

in the unlit fathoms of the lunchtime toilets,

torturing myself with ‘intrusive thoughts’

I feared were truly my own,

“nerves”, they said, was the problem.

“Nerves.”

Presumably I’d lost my nerve at eleven,

when some were losing their virginity –

my nerve had broken, my nerve had broken,

so what good was growing up to me?

How could I face up to life

when I hadn’t faced up to me?

First, the overshadowing sense of distance,

both in sense and in perception,

a creeping sense of absence…

absence makes the mind go wander…

absence, my capricious solution

to keeping myself at arm’s length,

time for delving into the soul at all else’s expense

like an introspective mole…

Prior to Primary School: play group,

(prior to play group the Humpy Dumpty

Club where I first learnt words mean

whatever you want them to mean)

crying at failing at tying my shoe laces,

being tugged away from mother’s hand,

dark of morning, sun of lunchtime –

What’s the time Mr. Wolf?

WORRYTIME!

Nursery rhymes, ring-a-rose’s sublime

hymn to plagues and dozing cows,

let dozing cows lie in their unfarmed meadows

along with dogs who dream of sheep,

firesides and chicken bones…

and when I was up I was up

and when I was down I was down

and when I was only half way up

I was neither up nor down

lucky dips, Jungle Sales, Redidindiguards,

elastic bandits, birdies (spiders),

jumbled names, vocab-a-brac:

Oliver Crumble would turn in his gravy

to see his little infants taught

to be true English Martyrs…

The dark set in when Fairy Fox

caught me white-eyed in the night

trying to picture infinity

and contain it in a thought;

then immortal childhood

Petered out to the wolf of worry

and into sad nostalgia:

dad started panicking for bomb threats

whilst commuting, buttering

only one slice of his toast every

Valium-cushioned morning,

sacrificing the other one

for the sake of the morbid God in him

asking him to fast for safe

passage to work and back…

mother started losing weight

at a morsel-masticating rate,

nerves sponge-wrung from nursing shifts

at workhouse-grave Swandean…

life is but a dream…

years before she’d lapsed a time

when grandma barred me from her bedroom,

took me downstairs with a cryptic

leave your mother be, she’s resting…

swallowed by the giant settee

I watched the tale of Jeremy Fisher

performed as a ballet on TV;

leaping about on lily pads as

the rain started to fall, then settling down

with the weather to angle – then the terrible

fright: a fish so monstrously large,

ferocious, jumping out from the water

trying to swallow him whole…

always scared at the sight of water,

deep water, dark, hidden depths

like that black-green tumble of oils

on the gloomy painting in my parents’ room

where I always swore I saw a shark

fining to the surface…

slowly, surely, started to see

too deeply, under the comfortable surface

deep to infinity, fathoms of blackness,

I didn’t want to see what lurked down there,

what massive beasts aggrandized to abnormal size, what monsters hovered in that silent dark….

the distance instanced itself swiftly,

wasn’t ready for the mist which gripped me

sinisterly, till I insisted incessantly

to a cautious father that I felt distant,

inexplicably, inexpressibly, as if

I was not in fact existent, just a lingering

thought in orbit outside the goldfish

bowl of life trying desperately

to tip back in and just stop thinking…

sinking, sinking, sinking…

but the currents gripped me,

I was caught in the whirlpool

suction, they tugged me under –

winter’s bleak and deathly dark

stole my summer thunder…

v. Soul Phobia

Long drive in banana-yellow Cortina

from Willow Crescent to who-knows-where

away from friends, memories, roots,

to Cornish brambles overgrown

and strange thoughts overblown

in the rubble-garden of Tremorton –

a witch’s cottage dad christened it wittily,

an inedible cud-clump of Hansel and Gristle’s

designs, Brothers Grimm-ish fairy tale darkness

about it; brother told me the story of

The Apple Tree which picked on my morbid imagination in its morose twist,

for there was such a tree contorting over

a filled-in well where someone else’s

wishes trickled, buried…

the school coach stopped outside, couldn’t hide

from the dazzling shadows of outside,

grey spectre of Secondary School came to

test me to the B-All; panics in the corridors,

despair at registration, concealing tears of sheer distress in the queue at dinnertime or sticking

a finger down my throat in the

unlit fathoms of the lunchtime toilets…

…had to focus on misty interests

to dispel clamping thoughts; I remember

suppressing a panic from my hereditary

illness whilst studying doodle-art

heraldry…azure, sable, gules –

I clutched at scrambled spares and tools

to tighten loose screws but education

only taught me desperation…

 

My first glimpse of oblivion:

the school blackboard, to me then

my life seemed like one scrape of chalk

smudging into the dark.

I was off school more than I had hot dinners

not scouring the streets but bursting my mind

with ideas that burnt brightly, then turned

to dark obsessing thoughts when at school;

possibilities pouring out of me I sought to explore

long before I found the freedom of poetry,

I was lost, so blissfully lost inside of me,

shunning nothing

feeling everything

Outnumbered by invisible bullies

punching at my equilibrium,

bruising with intrusive thoughts,

I despaired (can’t think of a better word) as

I followed the other boys down to

the muddy rugby pitch: scared of stopping

loving my father, though impossible,

it tormented me for frozen moments;

I panicked; couldn’t figure it:

numb for the obsessive buzz

of fear-bees bumping about my head.

- Alan Morrison!

- Here Miss, I think…

Suddenly I found my soul was lost

drowsing in a mind full of doomed beliefs,

dark doubts, a conflict fomented

tore the faith out of me, clouded my brow

with a deep sense of abysmal doubt –

had to get out, had to get out,

had to get in…

in, out, thoughts hokey-kokey about,

you do the O-C-Dokey and you turn around

around around around around –

that’s what it’s all about,

trying to break the circle, trying to get out…

(on the outside…)…

outside the windscreen I pleaded for

sanctuary from the sentence of school:

in tantrum filled with desperation

my nerve-struck knuckles pummelled on

the bonnet of my father’s car

like sleet pelting on painted metal –

dad’s face divided and strained as my cries

screeching with the windscreen wipers.

(on the inside…)…

either to be a premature dead-end or terrible

beginning, my thoughts juddered in my

darkening humid mind overcastting

with summer storm cloud maundering

from the blind east; tight eyes straining

to fathom detail of relentless hedgerows

cramping our car on narrow lanes

horribly idyllic in stretch – rain splattered

in harassing spits drumming the bonnet,

obsessing a web of drops on the windscreen

while the wipers screeched Can’t Cope! Can’t Cope!

Those tumbling coach journeys up to

cramped Landrake, up hill, down dale,

ultimately to forbidding school –

how I clung to my timeless interests, tried

to climb out from this spinning ride

that drove me to the scaffold of thought,

to the smell of orange peel, apple core

and cold air, in my mental stocks.

I used to pray the coach wouldn’t come,

do a wind dance in my head to stall its

determined chug to Trematon,

but come rain or wind or hurricane

the coach would always come.

 

Absentee days come with one

asthmatic catalyst of panic!

Through a goldfish-mask, to the subtle pump

of the nebulizer I re-discover

tranquillity, lost sight, sense of ever since

the last pants of innocence petered out

to airless puberty; sat there smiling

at my hunched parents pretending their

tears were just the betrayal of tiredness,

and, light-headed, learnt to breathe again

in botched amateur meditation…

 

Permitted for a period to blissful imprisonment

in myself – days of morbid introspection,

sitting downstairs in dirty sleeping bag,

refusing to wash, submission to self,

security of superficial cowardice, pretence

of being physically ill till something ‘psycho-logical’

was (detrimentally?) tagged on me…

I’d been absent from school for some time when Miss Black bumped into me in town and asked when I’d

  come back?

I turned white, went numb, just couldn’t say:

being still absent that Saturday.

(My class mates at school used to say

If you’re so clever why are you always away?

BECAUSE I’m clever I would have said

If I hadn’t been away that day.)

Going without eating, coughing the night

with self-trained tickle – anything to stay

off school next day – going out in the rain

to cultivate a chill, bliss of temperatures,

thermometers in tea – I longed to be ill –

feed a cold, starve a fever they used to say –

my fever was starved of empathy from

woe-betiding teachers, callous school inspectors,

Mr Evans with his sky-grey Navy gaze

of no excusing, warning my parents

I might just be playing them up, spreading

familial mistrust, trying to press-gang me

back into those deaf-dumb Comprehensive grounds;

fenced confines of a prison compound….

Sat, lacklustre, ‘mid the din

Of the ortho-orators –

Am I me, or was I him,

Stooped by the radiators?

Deep, deep down I always did

Knot my sickly stomach –

Others dared defy and carp,

Others slouched like hammocks.

I silent, timid, lachrymose

Allowed my mind to stray –

I faked alertness, mimicked zeal,

While my thoughts were far away.

I’d frown, I’d sigh, inside I’d die,

I’d plan a strategy

To cough my way through sleepless nights

So off, next day, I’d stay.

While some would be ashamed of this

I’ll simply end to say

That duty was for me a drain,

Numbing day to day.

my only release from this weekly trial

was scribbling out poems in the living room

in the soporific Friday afternoon,

quite oblivious to Mr Evans’ ever-presence –

but weekends were sacred, even he

couldn’t tug me away, I could feel free,

alive again till darkling Sunday

which I’d spend in inert mourning

for the fogging of the following day…

SUNday was a day not aptly named

For it never sunned on me.

My day of worry, not of rest;

My day of dark anxiety.

Gloomy mornings of weak tea,

Sickly dinners swamped in gravy

Served with cider always failed

To drowse my mind that dwelled gravely.

As Sunday afternoons seeped in

My thoughts would cloud over still more

Until the evening swallowed up

The safety of the day before.

The reason I believed in God

Was for the troubled Sunday skies,

Overcast like sad Golgotha:

Even the weather mourned Jesus Christ.

With knotted stomach, mind in grind,

Troubled brow in tortured furrow,

My nerves could never come to terms

With school on the tomorrow.

On the sofa I would gnaw my thumb,

Heave so heavy like a husk –

Some have also found their Hell,

And mine was spent in Sunday dusk.

then the therapy rooms:

un-telling scratches on counsellors’ pads

two-way mirrors, bric-a-brac,

tatty cuddly toys lining

low-lying window-sills, teddy bears

with bitten-out eyes, golliwogs

blanched half-cast in an anaemic sun,

an old dolls’ house so empty, no

one at home but an old rag doll,

no stripy Bagpuss to join me in

my drifting off from kith and kin…

no way out for me, nor in

for them, desperate, powerless to reassure

or reach me, save me from self-fear,

I was so ill-prepared for being here…

If I could wave a wand to cast

away the spell, I would

sobbed dad so often,

but no one could…

Let off the stress of school, conforming

each dark day between 9 and 3.30

for an indefinite spell lasting twelve months,

I reclined into an eccentric kind of reclusion:

the love of history, what’s gone, toy soldiers

marching like the past on my bedroom bookshelf heaped with damp Tolkien, Kipling, Haggard,

limed with damp-stain, cramming me in

with nostalgia’s sun-bleached souvenirs –

I’d always liked clutter, has to be said –

a desperate attempt to re-enact dad’s childhood

in the damp-stain countryside until

the rule of GOING TO SCHOOL dispelled

these morbid time-games, drove the genie

bottle-stopped in me back out

into wish-starved reality…

no more warped prayers to Odin, Loki-

striding thoughts, Gandalf-physiognomy

forming on the crumbly walls…

no more listening to Holst’s spirit-lift of Jupiter, RVW’s Seventeen Come Sunday

whilst staring out at a timeless green

through my bedroom window-pane,

forgetting the year, adjusting my name…

vi. The Fathoming

Time to fathom out phantasms,

give form, dynamic to intrusive fears…

I’d like to keep a scrapbook of your phobias…

the psychiatrist said, not sadistically

but with a certain eccentricity,

I could never fully see his eyes

for the reflection on his spectacles

in the naked light-bulb glare, as he

spoke sparsely, intermittently,

in-between confessions of my psyche

in a subtly silky Sud Athlikaarn accent,

my holy father this psychoanalytic Athlikaana…

STOP TRYING TO BE GOD!

I’ve got the whole world in my hands…

I’ve got the you and me together in my hands…

Should I have been confessing to a priest?

That dipsomaniacal Father Ted

struck off in the end for too many tots

of Christ’s blood as a night-cap before bed.

Raspberry-nosed, dosed high on incense –

on one end of a wood grid

with his spirited breath filtering in

to my cramped dark room of a head

did little to soak up the sin in me.

He needed a dry house as much as I

needed an explanation. For my first confession

I struggled a bit: I’d done no revision!

Invoking the (methylated) Spirit he asked

what I’d done wrong, I said I don’t know –

but he didn’t believe me – but I did believe –

if he believed in his God who he couldn’t see

why couldn’t he believe in me?

Believe I didn’t believe I’d committed

any particular, easily-specified sin?

He even suggested things I might have done

and in the end I capitulated, succumbed:

admitted to things I hadn’t done…

takes me back to my first ‘False Confession’…

…English Martyrs Primary School

Taught us hymns, Hail Mary’s, guilt;

On asphalt playgrounds, chalked pitches,

We played out innocence to the hilt.

One lunchtime, strayed to the other school

For spastic children, sat in class –

As I froze over a moment’s thought

My friends face-aped them through the glass.

Walnut-faced Miss Wall called us

Into her plimsoll-smelling office;

Pitting us against each other

With x 2 chances to confess.

Five No’s later, our only escape

From standing shame in assembly

Was for me to say Yes on their behalf

(A revelation to me).

Now I stood, the guilty one of the three,

Accused of betrayal by the other two

By confessing to what I didn’t do -

But who did I betray? Them or me?...

Was this, like taking First Communion

having not confessed that morning, a form

of perjury inviting Damnation? Who knows?

Only God I suppose –for you no absolution….

No absolution today I’m afraid:

the last milk bill is still unpaid.

The maundering milk-float of sins does its rounds

first thing every morning when it’s still dark…

silver top, gold top, cream of the pint

pours over cornflakes, sours the grain…

Looking back I should have confessed sins

I hadn’t committed anyway: just in case

in the future I committed them then I’d cover

myself in advance (precognitive purging) –

may evil come to he who evil thinks

is a saying I’ve heard somewhere, disturbing

but possibly something in it, I think,

to ruminate endlessly on dark acts

you know you wouldn’t do in actual fact

but that nevertheless obsess you like

a dark fantasy, can they be as good

as sins in substance and worthy to confess?

If so, one must find a name for them –

how about neurosins?

- father, I have sinned

- how so my son?

- I don’t know, I just know I’ve sinned…

- if I don’t know what you’ve done

how can I forgive you my son?

- I’m not seeking forgiveness father,

just a name for what I’ve done…

or for what I haven’t done…

Fear of losing control, of self’s possibilities,

or wanting to do unthinkable things,

ape behaviour alien to your nature:

reality testing psychiatrists say; consciously

one knows to destroy is to destroy one’s liberty,

but until this is lived out literally

it exists only mistily, as a theory…

free association peppered his guinea-pig technique, and though I held myself tight in binds of fright

I was never too frightened to speak.

- Your mother…

Sad, sad as sinking washing-up,

dirty water in a capsized tea-cup;

self-chastising, Catholic hang-ups;

chocolate, her self-christened sin,

swearing her highest vice – so good,

would starve herself to feed us so she would –

sobbing on the floor in floods of tears

in fear of repercussions from debt arrears –

scared of herself, frail with faith,

riddled in doubt as she flits like a wraith

through rooms carpeted with doubt;

scurries around her mental wheel

like an obsessing mouse,

spins chores like effortless confessions;

swallows sobs as she tidies the house.

In the beginning was the word,

and the word was Doubt.

There is always room for doubt

in the empty bellies of believers…

Alan, dinner’s on the table!

let me tell you a bit about belief:

it is not a belief until it’s been tested -

untested belief: just wish-fulfilment,

and the greatest test is grief,

not for the dead, for the living…

Alan, dinner’s on the table!

All I want is to be good. Just to be good.

Strong, bright, steadfast as a candle-flame

lit in the stony recesses

of cloistered St. Michael’s

at Midnight Mass…

warmed to the scent of candle-wax…

Father…

Bitter, bitter but so good…

little is better than bitterness, the

birthright to ends’ meet…skidded

down from higher rungs of crested

cutlery to empty plates, water rates,

recycled tea – to be cerebrally

middle-class but dated materially

like his seventies’ burgundy Maxi…

all the time slogging through shifts just to be

permitted to exist in poverty.

Just-So this bitter story. Just-So this bitterness.

Justified I think it is…but strife only bites

its own fingernails: only the interpretation

of failure fails, and bitterness bursts

its banks, floods back in sentiments…

my father will always be able to cry…

You speak as if YOU have inflicted

these troubles on your parents, and had

the power to put all right. Hence your

self-punishing tendencies. You haven’t

yet tapped in to a solution, eluding you

for the time being, until which you resign

to take on the vast atlas of family problems

onto yourself, a martyr through self-burdening –

stopping, stop-cocking, bottle-stopping

your own development, progression, only

to focus on obsessing on your parents’ powerlessness –

but you can’t solve what has no solving:

STOP TRYING TO BE GOD, just be human…

To be God? Who – me?

I wouldn’t have the first clue how to be….

you do the OCD and you turn around

that’s what it’s all about…oh!

C is for Compulsive, so I believe…:

Father, the ethical, earthed C of E,

called us Roman Candles, took his bread

un-leavened; spread butter

on only one slice of his toast,

spared the other half austerely;

stuck Anglican rationality –

Mother, Obsessive-Confessive, prone

to genuflecting superstitions,

self-prescribed Lourdes’ potions

for a phobia of pills –

but they shared one sparking trait:

waxen self-sacrificial wills.

Mother used to cross herself several times

if she’d use the name of the Lord in vain –

taught us to avoid cracks on the pavement,

walking under ladders, putting umbrellas

up in doors, to pop pennies in

the blasphemy box, to touch wood if uttering something we wished not to happen thereby,

like some unconscious spell, will to happen,

if we dared articulate the substance of a fear,

lest some thunder hands of fate clapped a response…

But what a sadistic God that would be:

quite pagan indeed – I didn’t believe

from the beginning in the Old Testament God –

the New Testament was stitched to the old

I understood…

avoiding at all costs, conjuring omens,

portents, willing into actually happening –

avoidance patterns like canticles

ward off certainty of possibilities…

checking, checking, perpetually checking

car keys, door locks, taps, stopped clocks,

fag-butts in the up-tipped ashtray –

must stub out the singed fag-butts!

Testing, testing…

reality testing: your thoughts are reality

testing: you wonder what would happen if

you let go – the interminable Devil tempting

your ear: let go, let go, else you’ll never

know what would happen unless you let go…

Always had a problem letting go,

plunging in the deep end –

preferred it in the shallows…

…let go of the edge, down deep down

into the depths, the cerebral depths

fathomless, smothering breaths,

fathoming, fathoming

coming up for air

- What do you see in those depths? He said, so he said,

tilting down from his practitioner’s pulpit…

- Nothing easily fathomed

dark as the torments of the damned

or far as I can go to comprehending them…

- I’d like a scrapbook of your fears

- Is that supposed to make me feel better?

- I’d like a photo-album of your phobias

- Is that supposed to make me feel better?

- I’d like some slides of your obsessions

- Is that supposed to make me feel better?

- Not necessarily – how do you feel?

- Oh, I feel much better.

But not because of what you’ve said

just because I’m being heard –

as soon as I’m no longer in here

my ears will burn with the need to purge…

- what did you just say?

- burning ears

- what was that…?

- ears burning

- what did you just think?

- burning

ears, must be my burning ears

betraying my membrane, telling my fears,

spelling out obsessions neatly, clearly

and the magic letters are O C D –

- I’ll be out of breath with the need to confess

my only palliating will be to express

- How express?

- Poetry.

- I’d like a slim selected works of your poetry

and keep them in a scrapbook

a little text to accompany the pictures,

not the waffle, just the imagery…

- will that help you diagnose me?

- no, but it would entertain me –

what stirs your pen?

- People. Feelings. Thoughts. Death. Love.

Lots of abstract stuff…

Spectacles reflect the light

the throbbing, prodding, probing light

glowing, glowing, knowing, knowing,

twenty odd years in psychiatry

can train a brain to distinctly see

into a patient’s mind, deftly find

a grey area of membrane, a cloud of ambiguity,

a semi-formed problem to slot neatly,

academically, into a category of disorder –

that get-out-clause for the shrink

as virus is for the doctor…

no sour cherry medicine to remedy me…

any self-respecting practitioner

has his ten point system for every symptom

confirming his own hypotheses, prognoses,

punching into his laptop prognostises…

To the patient beginner, neurosis novice,

all other such inflammations of the rational part

of the brain pickled in its draining brine

of serotonins will be a chair in a room,

a pair of spectacles’ shimmer, questions,

no answers, speculations, suggestions;

a listening ear deaf to fear, open only

to what it chooses to hear, a camera

in the corner, mirror on the wall, ignorance

to who is observing you behind that faceless

glass reflecting your gormless, pubescent

confusion – behind that sheet of glass,

that one-way pane, two-way mirror into

your mind sits a cryptic receiver like a jinx

in your sub-consciousness…

I’d sit there feeling distant, a blank face before me

listening to outpourings of my mind so poorly,

offering no solutions, no insights, no hints,

just unsmiling glass bouncing lamp-light glints –

there was nothing to understand was all I understood – sometimes I’d peer deep as I could

into the faceless mirror staring back from the wall,

offering no solutions, just futile reflections

of the lost ghostly boy with his nameless afflictions –

but I was no fool, I knew someone invisible

was observing me from outside my goldfish bowl.

Let all remain ruminating in ambiguity

terrifying to you, interesting to them…

vii. Feeling Distant

- It all started with feeling distant.

As if I wasn’t there, or here. As if I was

strangely absent. Haunting life.

Perhaps a ghost still lurks in there

growing up in his brother’s shadow –

but that’s too pithy, peering too shallow…

- How deep do you wish to peer?

- Deep enough to make all things clear,

to dispel fear. Fear of fear itself.

Must fill the space of nothing

by obsessing on something…

- Do you think you do this to yourself?

- Why should I want to sacrifice my mental health?

- How deep do you see?

- Too deep. Too deep even to sink.

- Next time try being more succinct.

It started with a panic, asthmatic catalytic panic –

isn’t it interesting how some words sound a bit

similar, etymology I mean, getting to roots of things, nuts and bolts of words which germinate

  to limit

thought itself – quite disturbing to think on it

but please try to be empathetic:

Good = God/Evil = Devil

obvious/unobvious isn’t it?

I cultivated limited breath

from suppressed dread of death…

tried to control my feelings, thoughts

morbidly prolific as school register noughts

attained through twelve months of mental truancy –

school-phobia they labelled it, bottled it for me…

budging out the old childhood genie…

If I’d known it was coming to stay

I would have got something in…

I was powerless save my propensity

at self-punishing, inability to forget.

Complete lack of self-discipline and will

as easily persuaded as dope-fiend by pill…

- My this is very stimulating

- And then there’s the deafness…as if suddenly

I hear but don’t listen, there’s nothing I can do –

just don’t listen: all the time some line

of thought’s distracting me – it’s like suddenly

turning deaf or no longer understanding

your own language, only when it’s spoken

by others; mouths move; lips articulate words;

words come out, sound out, disperse to air

blocked out by some filter in my inner ear…

always listening to myself…

- Do I take it you’re not a good listener?

- Maybe, but not from want of listening.

- But hearing isn’t necessarily listening is it?

- This deafness is imprisoning; I don’t choose

to shut off, it’s just I can’t shut off my thinking…

- Are you listening?

- Sorry?

- Are you listening to me?

- What’s that?

- Do you listen?

- Sorry? So bitterly sorry. I apologise, but I

didn’t choose to be me, you see; to be like this…

Did my obsessiveness set in repeating

Hail Marys for each wood bead of the rosary

strung like the conkers garnered outside

from the autumn-fall, vinegar-swelled,

knocking each-other, the loser the first

to split its pussy innards - or was it

while learning a lesson for not paying attention

in the classroom by copying out sorry, won’t

do it again over and over, but then

I didn’t choose to be me…

none of us choose our lives, identities,

not even our names – not just Christianity

is responsible for that. At least, it gives you

a second chance to find a namesake in amongst

the massed ranks of patron Saints –

you can be born again in alias – for my

confirmation I chose St. Andrew, my brother,

Joseph, but we’re still James and Alan. I

was named after Allan Quatermain

but with just the one l – if I had a confirmation

again I’d ask for no name but wait

for my self to grow into one of its own,

inspire its own, custom-made – names

are partly to blame for shaping our

identities – a label of syllables brailles

a creel on the ego-typescript of the brain…

allow me to attempt to explain:

before Able came Cain, before Cain came Adam

before Adam came God, or unutterable Yahweh –

but perhaps It originally had no name

till we gave It one through religion,

if It was still nameless we wouldn’t be

able to invoke It by name, to lift Its

title as a form of blackmail, to champion

our various claims to being above

judgment, blame…Don’t take the name

 of the Lord in vain.

Names tame, constrain, control,

categorize, capture, imprison, limit

in size the potential scope of our

self-possibilities…

No more need for anxiety or pain:

everything’s alright now it has a name.

Whatever worries you – give it a name…

give it a name, a name, a name,

give it a name to blame…

Names, labels are all to blame

for not grasping the meaning and aim….

human as I am I found my first coping stone

to steady on the day I was given a name

for my pet disorder: the unpronounceable

ocd, spelt out O-C-D.

…and you’re in great company:

Bunyan had it, so did Swift,

Boswell, Johnson (Dr. that is),

Kierkegaard, Rossini, Proust,

Charlie Dickens, Charlie Darwin,

Rousseau, Pascal, Stravinsky, Ibsen,

Satie, Hans Christian Andersen

and beached-up Brian Wilson…

something of a privilege…

Suddenly I felt relieved as if a vast weight

had been lifted from me, or shifted a little

to sit more comfortably; no longer quite

the crumple-faced Atlas I’d been for some time,

or the ever torn Tantalus – a wave

of self-realization washed through me

cleansing every cavity of doubt in me

crashing in, cleaning out dark caves

of fear that had echoed only questions in me

for years – now I’d come out into a wide

answering sea hissing O C D…

Not an answer of course, just a category,

I’d score 9 on the point system of their itinerary

and be eligible for the sought-after prize

of belated behavioural therapy

apportioned to me quite casually

after a half-hour condensed case study

and scribbled-out prognosis – only

a thirteen month wait for a gruelling shock-

tactic therapy to frazzle anxiety…

but still no explanations…

to begin with, you may be persuaded by

yourself to do your best to ignore and avoid

your own processes of thought, or attempt to;

avoidance patterns be the worn-out phrase

pebbledashes the shattered scatter of your mind

trying desperately to come to terms with itself,

its out-of-synch workings, its stuttering cogs,

stuck in a rut, in a rut tut tut…

brings to mind an interesting formative pattern:

old Catholic church-going rituals of childhood

could possibly account for this adult compulsion

of revolving ritual to avoid the pivot of sin

keeps you turning, micing, spinning your

tumbola thoughts, anything, any self-

distracting harmless action, ritualized habit

to avoid bad habits, tendencies to stop,

listen to the devil tempting your ear

YOU could be the Lord of the Dance, says he

try some incense, cross your torso

several times, make the spell, if it works,

then mores-so, genuflect when you get in bed,

confess to God with panicking breaths…

do anything but obsess on what obsesses you

but by so doing, find it’s all that obsesses you….

- whatever you do don’t think of pink elephants –

don’t think of pink elephants whatever you do –

what are you doing?

- I’m NOT thinking of pink elephants

- what do you do?

- I’m thinking of pink elephants

try as you might to shut the door again,

put your mind right, it won’t go away

by simply ignoring it – that old legend:

feed a cold, starve a fever comes back to play

but won’t be your redeemer:

this is no physical fever –

next comes the self-prescribing stage

leafing through each dog-eared page

of a self-diagnosis pamphlet – intrusive

thoughts read obsessions read phantasms,

conscious symptoms of deep embedded

conflicting emotions – no elucidation:

in the systematic verbiage of an out-of-date

leaflet – panic sets in with ceaseless

speculating, morbid ruminating,

as to the pinning down of your condition –

symptoms can be easily misinterpreted

depending on what you read into them…

viii. School and Avoiding It

I’d do anything to be allowed to stay

off school; every day I’d try and conjure

up a way of being ill (little I knew then

it was down to low levels of serotonin!)

I pleaded for sanctuary, for staying off school

by staying awake and coughing all Godless

night in the damp oblivion of bed –

I could only ever settle down when mum said

alright, we’ll take you to the doctor tomorrow –

Dr. Whoever would diagnose a blip of high

blood pressure but otherwise hypochondria;

prescribe me a sharp dose of school.

I used to long to be ill: anything than this

undiagnoseable state; being physically

ill brought with it an almost paradisical

sense of bliss, relief from myself:

I was off school for poor bodily health,

could be pampered, reassured, not told off

and scalded by the school inspector –

I’d illness as my hot-thermometer protector;

real fever, blissful fever, satisfactorily

moderately high temperature – long may real

fever reign, fend off mental fever.

Feed a cold, starve a fever my dad would say –

no food for thought for blissful bedridden days

(I know this is bad, what more can I say?).

Better have a real fever than imaginary one:

symptoms of phantasms, having my mum

mopping my brow as I broke out in sweat

Lemsipping through a puffed pillow day

pissing out Lucozade, burning by night

restless and sweaty (and if the fever petered

out, my asthma would come up trumps,

I’d be puffing away on my browns and blues);

better the sweat of real fever than porous

pores of a nervous panic, brow clammy

as if with temperature, but puzzlingly normal,

how often I longed for the mercury to rise –

off from school! Sometimes the two

fevers were indistinguishable.

Is it possible to will oneself to be ill?

I think, from experience, it is,

thermometers in tea can assist you in this…

but for me never anything so clandestine,

I wouldn’t lie, never lie, wouldn’t fake,

wouldn’t take advantage, wouldn’t try to make

mountains out of mole-hills, cry wolf, would I?

What’s the Wolf Mr. Time?

fear of the self, soul-phobia, compels

like some compulsion, a dipsomania, addiction,

while you’re withdrawing you’ll exaggerate

whatever possible physical symptoms you feel

and even make yourself believe you’re ill –

you’ll come to believe your own lies….

soon you come to cherish morbid highs

such as relief you feel when let off

school or the numbness just before sleep

when you get away from it all…

All language is misleading, corrupting

(I used to think more colourfully before I learnt

reading and writing), limiting thoughts, feelings

in the strait-jacket of words, vague phrases

are trumped up down textbook decades to

christen shape-shifting symptoms of

delirious broken-down minds; the most

famously vague of them all, the chestnut:

nervous breakdown. Then there are the phrases

clichéd and point-missing (how can you sum up

the unsumupable?), or simply not evocative enough:

I’m at the end of my tether; quite at my wit’s end;

wrung through with worry; going round the bend;

can’t go on anymore; reached the end of the road;

can’t stand it anymore; cracking up; can’t cope…

…if you’ve heard all these before

then there’s always it’s the last straw…

I’ve heard these trotted out so many times

they just blur into impotent lines –

no words can truly express the feelings

that necessitate their syntactic crimes.

The blind path of etymology: a perfect

example: pathetic/empathetic – no

relation apparently, or have they?

ix. C is for Compulsive

Crossing myself three times before bed.

Crossing myself three times before bed.

Three because it’s half of six – six must

always be avoided – make sure you make

the cross the right way up – nothing upside down Satanic in that – first the head, then feet,

left, right, repeat with me:

victuals, vestibules, wallet and crutch.

Don’t even think it! Thinking is sinning isn’t it?

Can’t even think blasphemous terms, don’t take

His name in vain, in fact, better to not even

say his name – or do you court perpetual pain?

(Won’t be soothed by a mortal aspirin).

Don’t even think to sell your soul:

the boatman plunges a very deep pole,

steer clear thy stern, don’t capsize

and tip into his sinking inking thinking….

THINK AND SINK – SINK OR SIN - THINK OR SIN

If you cross the aisle of pews before the raised altar, genuflect, or be a mental heretic!

God sits in those silent booths

that milestone every few cloistered paces

in Church; you may pop into one

whenever the urge to purge takes you;

purge yourself of sin to the ear of a receiver

within; not the Holy Ghost, a cloth-d receptacle

who’ll keep your confessions under his belt

and cassock; offer you absolution.

Time to kneel on the hard thin cushion

cake your tongue in the body of Christ,

tastes of nothing, rice-paper wafer

coats the roof of your mouth till swilled

out with wine; the unleavened bread

has no flavour to savour, its pure in taste,

like holy water, invisibly cleansing,

more quenching than the wet stuff…

First Communion: First Sin:

Forgot, God, forgot to go Confession:

No Absolution: maybe Damnation?

Incensed Him in initiation.

I open to receive His Body nonetheless,

Innocent to my callow sin’s trespass.

They’d said the bread, unleavened,

Would taste a bit like Heaven:

Had my taste-buds given up at seven?

Confusion at the flavour of the Saviour:

He doesn’t taste of anything.

The roof of the church

caked in tasteless Salvation

like the roof of the mouth

at Holy Communion.

You can’t have your transubstantiation AND taste it!

Then the blood: cinnamon and wine –

not simply to complement a dine

but also to cleanse your contaminated veins

rinse out their arterial sins

with celestial serotonins

to course through them so no salt remains…

salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper…

so rituals continue, recur, mysteries

likes of Roundheads and Oliver Crumble

doused for some time till histories

re-surrendered to them through toleration

truncated as their hefty collars…

Incense spreads through echoing cloisters

like a faithful grandmother’s musky perfume –

frankincense from a Boots cosmetics counter…

mysteries, rituals, suggested beliefs,

libations, communions, means of relief

through confession, absolution, retribution,

transubstantiation, damnation,

Latin hymns, beginnings, endings

permeate cryptic sermons of priests…

staring in masochistic awe

like Ticki self-deprecatingly towards

the altar’s salvation, shivering with insight

that he forfeited his heavenly right

for the cardinal sin of compassion…

rods knock down, excommunication –

surely God has empathy for the victims

of His Creation? He gave them free will,

He walked in their shoes, so why should

he turn from those who choose to choose

and send them hurtling down to burn?

Maybe some of us already suffer

torments of the damned –

but is this to prepare us for

Hell or a better hand?

I don’t think He will, I hope not anyway,

because spiritually speaking I’m going

the same way – not through suicide I hope,

nor by a brush with it like Stevie, but

by conjuring morbid doubt, failing to find

the way out, or refusing to go like Dido…

Am I to be one of those lost souls

whose genuflecting lives

brought with them disappointments

and clumsy suicides?

Or am I to rebel and quell

all my nagging doubts

and turn away from God until

his Heaven lets me out?

Control, control, must push bad feelings

out, flush them out, brush away questions,

block doubts out, perform my personal

rituals to navigate the battens of doubt,

steer round them with avoidance patterns…

If you want to shut the thoughts out clap your hands!

(clap, clap)

If you want to shut the thoughts out stamp your feet!

(stamp, stamp)

Compulsions come, light Roman candles,

pussy-foot round beacons on sand in sandals,

hair-shirted skin prickling within, shivering

without, exposed to stormy doubt…

long ago I first noticed His footprints fading…

was it me He was carrying

or was it me carrying Him?

I just can’t find the path out, the ball of thread’s

still bound, I’m lost and only partly found

in mouse-wheeling about –

thought – push out – push back – return -

remain – stuck inside – won’t shift –

too fat to lever through – examine – probe –

analyse – aggrandize – speculate – relate –

dissect – distort – contort – monstrous –

realise – panic – primed brink of impulse –

numbness – paralysis – pressed in on self –

pressed in – pursed breath – pursed muscle –

pursed brain – logic burst – paralysis – splinters –

bottle-stopped – corked – pickled – brined –

confined – fear-frozen – defence mechanism –

jarred mid-turn – survival – adrenalin buzz –

relief pelt down – somnolent – soporific –

solipsistic – deep breath – deep – breath –

release – relief – release…

impulse expelled, inverted, dissipated,

impermanence pushed aside as before,

tucked back under carpet of consciousness,

compulsion assembles its brain-blunting tools

to control all your thoughts through behaviour

that stalls you in your tracks, saves you from what appals, again you’re a moment-focused animal…

vivid images inarticulate blur

and dim their numbing pall…

think of bliss, focus on this

benumbing mental bliss –

Paradise must be something like this bliss

when panic persists then ceases desists

Hell must be not knowing yourself well

  and fearing just what Hell is…

my first sense of Hell was in feeling well

but mentally something amiss,

a sense of loss, cavernous belly-

ache of emptiness, too gut-sick to eat,

too afraid, and not having a name for this…

- what’s wrong?

- I feel sick

- what is it?

- feel sickI’ve sinnedI think

I sink into cushions…

Sink. Sin. Sink. Sink or sin. Sin makes you sick.

Sin surges up in your throat makes you throw up faith, vomit it out to stain the floor

doubling you up in retching fit

when there’s nothing left to purge….

- If you don’t feel better by lunchtime

I’ll phone your mum so you can go home.

Bliss floods like serotonins

into every artery tensed within

this egg-shell soul – it’ll be fine,

sunny, safe back at home in the

warm Satsuma-glowing afternoon

and tomorrow will feel an age away

and maybe never come…

- First I’ll take your temperature

No. No tea to hand to put it up.

- It’s normal

Then I can’t be.

- You still feel ill? Then we’ll send you home –

I’ll get your mother on telephone…

Thank God and goodness and everything-else –

I’d even thank the Devil if it was down to him….

The cream phone of home rings. And rings.

And rings again. Goes dead. Ominously dead.

God’s dead.

- Oh, there’s no one home. That’s odd.

Odd. Very odd. Must be something morbidly wrong.

- Is there no one home? I’m all alone.

No one answering the call. Rather like me –

but if I heard my Call I’d answer it, yes,

answer it, trip hand in hand with destiny,

I’d be up and over the horizon following

Him before He could say Follow Me…

Do not be afraid…

A prophet has no honour amongst his kin;

kith and kin have the best intentions

and are quite well-meaning, but He said

you must leave all of them for Him.

No one home. Oh God. Curse fate. Curse

me mostly. Oh God. Can it be?

All alone. Where did mother go?

Several sick-bay sojourns later….

- Alan, do you know what a hypochondriac is?

I did know of course.

- Someone who oughtn’t to exist;

Someone who only pretends to be ill;

Someone who shirks from duty, life;

Someone who cries wolf like Peter –

- Is it Miss?

- Mmmm

- what’s the time Mrs Wolf?

Tawny, wrinkly, simian Miss Rouse,

caretaker and crotchety custodian

of lunchtime sick-bay purgatory

accuses me of being me

perhaps for the first time, shape of things to shun,

a hypochondriac, school-phobic, I’d prove one…

amongst other things, culminating in

morbid jottings, joining handwriting,

shading the gaps in-between the letters,

berated by a teacher who had little empathy

for such disturbing compulsive inkings…

My first sense of inexplicable loss

came in the doubt-shadowed shape of the cross –

crossed knees, thoughts lolloping around

like beads on rosaries, conkers on the ground…

Cross-faced Miss Wall casts dark on our

pale foreheads, fingers rosary beads,

makes us chant a Hail Mary for

each wooden ball, striking fear

of sin first thing in the Golgothic morning

assembly dead on nine for thine

is the Kingdom, Uncertainty, Story

long-pantomimed in Nativity plays

- knock knock

- who’s there?

- excuse me, have you a room for the night?

- no sorry

- knock knock

- excuse…

- sorry

- knock

- no

- we do have a stable though

An angel-faced Joseph guides Maddy Longhurst’s Mary to the straw-buttressed stable

for the birth to change all history –

one day in a school term’s routine…

away in the manger

a crib for a bed

the little Lord…

and so say all of us…

Miss Blades thought the sun shone from the halo

of my little Lord Fontelroy hair; she’d cast

her angel-faced golden boy in all the leads of all

her class’s plays – the most challenging

was playing David, singing I am a shepherd boy

before the assembly hall audience –

and when I slew Goliath inside me he grew

taller the more I slung little stones

at him, the stones would lodge inside

my chest; lead to dark obsessing…

Plimsoll spoor-print polished floor

grounds our numbers’ numb bums in

an overcast assembly hall;

Calvary clouds crowd the windows;

the dark jackdaws like a flock of crows.

Morning has broken…

Miss Wall re-manifests, impresses

guilt, our catechism –

unspeaking, issues this instruction:

Question your desires…

hymns to Him on every morning –

bespectacled, beaky Miss Blades

pince-nez pinched nose perches like

Professor Yaffle at her bookend piano,

marches thimble fingers on

the thumping ivories…

My eyes have seen the glory of the…

A hundred and something oyster mouths

chorus OHP-penned cant…

He’s got the whole world in His hands…

the whole world, and the one to come,

the world without end, inexpressible bliss

terrifyingly inconceivably infinite

white mist without form on and on…

more horrific than oblivion,

the claustrophobia of infinity…

as an infant I filled with holy terror

at that unfathomable legend: forever and ever…

the footprints started fading again…

Do not be afraid…

The music dies; lift of spirits sinks to sighs.

So each morning from nine to ten

six impressionable years branded

with one indelible AMEN.

x. Grandma – Death’s First Awakenings

The mid-decade limbo-time, bridge to dark

late eighties days, puberty reared its ugly head

and slowly crept about a body bombarded

with change; but cerebrally-speaking this

tortured metamorphosis (a hormonal lycanthropy

of sorts), the darkness was setting in…

Nineteen Eighty-Five. Only a summer adjusting ties

broken irrevocably through the longest drive

from Sussex down to darkest Cornwall

and a new home in brittle countryside…

up-rooted from the only true home I’d know

and flung into the sticks so strikingly

different: yellow mortar, orange bricks,

seventies’ fondant-curbed suburbia…then

sudden flight back in time in a taxi to

dishevelled Brighton with mum and wore-wounded granddad to share grandma’s last days

round a hospital bed with a bowlful of grapes

as I played in the hospital grounds…

Death lacks subtlety on first introductions:

there grandma lay like a corpse already

struck down by stroke, mouth agape, paralyzed,

dribbling, whining like a crumpled child,

eyes saucer-wide staring into space: the stroke’s humiliation – Beryl Wilkinson

was once larger than life in obesity of body

and mind, garrulous, gregarious, out-going, domineering, but endearingly so, fond of avocados,

now surrounded in the colour of the pulp of

  that fruit:

pale mucus green gloss on walls of the ward;

there she lay shrivelled-up like a raisin, dribbling

like a baby down her paralysed chin, but something still ticked deep within – her devoted husband held out my miniature plastic Christ in front of her frozen eyes, mistakenly he told her it was Our Lady

for the paint of the beard had faded –

I swore I saw a tear ebb in her frozen eye

and trickle down her wrinkled skin…

to behold this moribund sight touched me

profoundly then – too young to see

how blackly un-consolidating the end of it can be,

coma, sleep of the dead, or those readying

for death, long unbroken sleep that surrenders

breath – this moment embedded deep in me,

forming a morbid god I became lost to…

the morning she passed away we weren’t there:

the hospital phoned to let us know –

my granddad raged with grief blaming me

for his absence in her last motionless moments:

I’d made a fuss for tiredness, boredom, that morning, so we’d left earlier than planned you see…

only years down the line of lingering

ghosts in my time-haunted mind would I

come to site this deflated finale to her life

as a seminal moment in my darkness of mind,

when I first stared at the face of death,

grey, misty, luminous, fathomless –

the sickly smell of disinfectant turns memory to this

with the fumes of stale bed-linen piss…

xi. Intrusive Blue – Digression to my Brother

Nineteen Eighty-Six-ish. Dark time for me and you.

(I’d ask if you remembered but I know you do).

But you keep it to yourself like old obsessions,

struggling through puberty, grown in shade

like fungus of parental prejudices –

you made up your own mind, self-influenced,

browsing in prose, blissfully oblivious

to your private problems, personal in the abstract.

Your younger brother, pale, self-punishing,

bruised by his own blows – while you

were pummelled by bullies’ jibes – couldn’t

compare to your peerless pith, obscured

by the dark of your stubborn shadow;

possibly he was brave: after all you

were spared phantasms he battled with,

as he was spared your bullying.

 

Falling into first person, I pay tribute

to us both: two sides of the same bitten penny – despite barely having one to rub together - we

battled our apportioned adversaries best

we could; remember the time I struggled

to freeze my tears while you stood your ground

to abuse bawled out in brutish bruising prose

in the bedlam of the dinner queue?

You caught my eye, I appealed to yours,

mine red-ringed, yours older-brother-hooded

with pursed compassion, held in deep, still

so today but bruising there

each time I meet your melting stare.

No doubt you remember those dark times too;

my protectively asserting one night

when the dam of your stoicism broke down

and your soul burst out, how I’d take on those

bullies at school if they didn’t stop – but

back then I stayed wombed in homebirdish

self-exile, my compulsion to cry wolf of

the body for obsessions, intrusive thoughts,

six prison-like hours at school provoked;

so I was absent, twelve months off from obligation

when I tried to be absorbed in your shadow –

who could press-gang a shadow into school?

In the dark, a shadow’s invisible.

You were left to your own devices to fend

off foes in the corridor dark – the bubble

of inhibition burst with the slam of a culprit

against the lockers, and paradoxically

your plight was defeated in one goaded blow:

your initiation into brutish school boy tribe

passed with distinction to your sense of shame

in having succumbed to lashing out –

now you’d gained the pugilists’ respect but lost

respect for your own self-restraint.

You’d no choice, nor had I: couldn’t find a form

of combat effective against my enemy;

Dad’s soldier hadn’t been drilled for this

type of demon – reality’s rifle, fixed bayonets

of reason, crossed swords, can’t exorcise a ghost –

so I burrowed under my unpacked troubles, brought

on the strop of the School Inspector whose

coming overcast the morning when

Simpkin’s Soldiers slapped down in the post.

Ultimatum-ly my lamb-limp spirit

was rehabilitated into slow month-hours of school;

my slight rib-strapped satchel of bones

contracted on the rack of growing pains to

an under-nourished five feet eight that might

have been a more substantial height if meals

hadn’t been transubstantiated to problems

on my plate - my lily-white skin sustained its tint,

impossibly pale in the cold school light.

They asked me, those three, that dark trinity,

the Teacher, Inspector, and absence-tick taker

woe-betiding Miss Bowen, bible-black belt,

why can’t you just be like your brother? I never

told you that did I? Your obscure shadow.

One dark afternoon after school

you came in odorous of classrooms,

uniformed in the gold and black

of the Comprehensive, put me down

for my callow daddy-fied infatuation

with chivalry as Imperialist.

I capitulated, naïve

to phases, present in absenteeism.

You, dissecting the chop on your plate

as if a frog’s lung in Biology,

your cutlery, pilfered scalpels,

muttered you were a Socialist.

I read red into that heralding,

no inkling I’d soon share your diction:

junk cultures spawning like lab samples -

I can’t understand, on your soap-

pouf fee scratching berry-juice eczema

on nettle-rash skin, how anyone says

‘I am a passionate Capitalist. But back then

I just drooled for the crackling.

For us, the cryptic incantation summing

up that lightless time was CONSERVATIVE –

what did it mean? To keep the same?

To pickle? Preserve? I thought it could’ve come

from conservation as our Science teacher often

spiced Horticulture with politics, touting

our votes in foregone-concluded school

elections while we dug up potatoes.

Innocent novices to such semantics

on moving to that rustic Trumpton, we

earned a tenner between us for the chore

of posting Tory pamphlets through each blue-

rosette-d door of this burgess Snottyash,

canvassing for dad’s feral friend whose giant

paws cowboy-built a country prison

for darkly mortgaged future, debt of renovation

discarded halfway, sturdy as straw –

the wind huffing, puffing to wolf-blow it down

to the chagrin of Billy goats gruff.

We’d learn to live there as with loss

in unheated life-bereavement,

father betrayed to unemployment,

mother left to cobweb-sweep the pieces.

First night, we three slept downstairs

in the plastered sanity of the finished room,

but you, right at that botched beginning,

cast yourself upstairs, locked in the dark

of your territory, the light of your books.

It took me more time to be illumined,

to find first inspiration in the written line’s

spark, the lift of light music we listened to;

alternative view dazzling in from the sun-

struck garden through the gloom of the window

under the beam slanting over us like

a black rainbow brimming with timeless possibilities.

The light ignited inside me in time

like the lightning stab of awakening conscience,

a faith-conversion, reinvention of self,

heart, spirit, perception: we both woke

up from a bottomless dream to see the

concrete-grey bomb shelter garden outside

could become overgrown, green,

and this house’s brittle, crotchety stone

could in time prove to us every prison

has in it the potential to be a home.

We uncovered our own incantation

to wash away intrusive blue,

cast off the cold spell of private interests

with our new-found friend: SOCIALISM.

But as often the case you blindly imbue

a belief with an ingredient of you,

come up with a recipe of your own, cloak

with the closest comparison and stick

it in a semantic oven to rise, solidify –

so names, labels corrupt, constrain, contain

in mono-meaning discarding alternative views –

don’t treat your OCD as a determining label,

you said to me, but you didn’t understand

I needed that tag to rule out being mad.

Though Socialism was a limited term didn’t

limit our scope, just pinned it down like

a butterfly to cork – our beautiful conception

of how life could be was to be

a cross for us both to bear unbalancing

our own well-being equally inside

and out, in the public glaring contradiction

of reality: people weren’t how we expected them

to be. You were bullied for your unfashionable

beliefs, your sincerity, at school – I was

punished the same in a different way:

for my sensitivity, my nerves which served

a similar purpose to names and stick

they stoned you with.

One peer stood by you, your

only friend bar me, another brotherly

bond; he helped you fend off spitting fists

of violent verbs with his force-field of faith,

one of God’s chosen – in return for his friendship

you felt obliged to put Catholicism aside,

embrace prayer meetings, enlisting in

biblical mime shows of Born Again

tambourine bashes, all the while

doubting as Morrisons do.

Meantime, I suffered lessons on

mathematical abstractions, indivisible

substance of atoms, one of whom,

God, was devoutly worshipped by

that Zealot-bearded Physics teacher, blinkered

disciple of evangelism and Bunsen

burners, who shouted at me what are you

going to do with your life Morrison? (nothing

to do with Physics, obviously, I

would have said if I’d had a voice

but inhibition denied me that choice) –

I sulked on, dumb, deaf to the judder

of the devil I tried to put behind me,

whispering ever temptingly;

numbing me back to reality.

We once held leads, two brother mongrels

tugging them, the eldest dark, self-

possessing, the youngest, fair, insecure:

our feral parallels in canine miniature –

like me, you projected symbolism in

this animistic lycanthropy; how we

both suffered when the dogs were persecuted,

under sentence of death by the dog Herod,

sheep-obsessed farmer – you,

subjected to curses of interrogation

from his straw-masticating mouth in the back

of his cousin’s stuffy police car; while

I sat sobbing in the dark of the lounge

as PC Legg said they’d put down

‘the black one – what’s his name son?...’

propped on the ceiling beam, the

unannounced master of the house.

One of the blackest times for you and me,

but the dogs were acquitted, so were we

(anyway, the farmer’s shot gun

was just the gossip of hyperbole).

So, book-bound older brother, we’ve

both come through the other side into

the radish-bite of reality’s compromising sting:

scourge of work, striving for living, putting

priceless ideals to one side as we tread

the cracks on corrupted paving, but keep

in mind our old youthful ideals, not taking

our dream-raised eyes off principles’ strings,

invisible beneath our feet; our oldest

allies, the ends we must make meet,

though they were put in mothballs

along with stones and slings.

xii. Adrift from Kin

A prophet hath no honour Alan, my father’d quote,

especially amongst his own kith and kin…

A prophet hath no honour in his land (timp-tum)

A prophet hath no honour in his land (timp-tum)

A prophet hath no honour

And he’s bound to get some bother

Yes he’ll only come- a-cropper in his land (tumpty-tum)…

of all the troubled twists to thistle my life

I never predicted this distancing: first

the physical sense of distance, as if I didn’t

exist, was elsewhere, outside, lost as I’d

been as a child, having climbed out from

the car-door window and melted into

the stranger-jungled street….; it was as if

I’d suddenly missed my own shadow for

becoming it, transmogrifying into

my own light-cast echo – I’d been in my

brother’s shadow since birth, had become

his shadow without knowing it….

- What are you going to do about your absences Morrison?

When will you address your lack of presence?

It’s years since you left school and yet

It hasn’t made much difference:

You used to live in your brother’s shadow

And pretend not to exist

But now that you’re someone in your own right

You’re less conspicuous…

- It’s years since I left school sir, yes,

and every night the same dream recurs:

just when I think it’s time to leave I learn

I’ve still got one more term…

my first day at Secondary School I left late

in an unfamiliar place, no one waiting at the gate:

my brother thought I’d gone on ahead of him –

an hour or so later I’d found my way back

to the make-shift half-way house of ours

but panicked as I peered in through the window:

no one was in, the lounge lay empty

like a dying relative waiting for witness;

my rational side realized they’d left to

scour the streets in search of me, but

that more dominant something of doubt inside

whispered they’d abandoned me, left me on

my own forever – looking in through the

glass to a shell of home I felt something

steering off in me, cutting adrift, sailing away

on its own storm-rumbling journey…

…through the window I could see

the lounge was empty, and the phone

rang unanswered – no one home.

Trying to find them they found me

and pulled up in the lamp-lit street

fog-lights ghosting out my form

but they found no one home.

I’d spend the next ten or so years trying

to find my way back to a happier time

of unfaltering faith in family ties,

the absolutism of origins; the reassuring

unquestioned utterness of nurture, inception….

(happiness and fear are in anticipation…)

I’d never be the same again…not since

I first saw myself reflected in the window-glass,

lost outside, not since I first imagined

seeing myself through loved-ones’ eyes…

here the sheer horror of self-perception

started morosely closing in without

warning or obvious beginning, just subtly,

sublimely, clandestinely, like a slowly

invading illness invisible as a virus:

a mercurial adolescent I’d darkly become,

before knowing it I was as bitter as the wind,

bitter beyond my years through belly-

aching strife, clothes-outgrown poverty;

an obscure sort of poverty intent on chipping mercilessly away on the esteem

and stamina of a psyche predestined

no particular way, not nature nor nurture

my nemesis, just accident of circumstance

and subsequent intellectual corruption:

the incessant need to dissect, understand

instead of forget and look forward…

suffering wasn’t enough to numb me,

I needed to make some sense of its excuse

to nibble away at me…slowly but surely…

chip on my shoulder, axes to grind prolifically,

I found one day I’d left behind my temporal sanity

temporarily it turned out to be thankfully…

I can’t digress too much on this dark chapter

in my life so far, for it still fills me with

a sense of rational madness, inextinguishable

sadness – I’ve been told before I’m frighteningly sane

– suffice to say an acquaintance’s suicide

left me lost inside, nowhere to hide,

he’d confided in me not long before

his schizophrenic cloud cast over him

and drove him off the edge of a cliff…

internalizing this terrible incident I saw

myself in his shoes, before long I imagined

in turn myself in others’ shoes: should my

loved-ones lose me how would they mourn

and remember me; how would they feel

in my empty room pottering through

forgotten things, ex-belongings;

how would they miss me missing me…?

I became obsessed with becoming a memory

how else could I become this but by destroying me

a morbidly laughable thought one might note

but never before such a powerful thought:

self-oblivion, to make oneself nothing,

forgotten but not forgotten, forever outside

seeing into others’ sad memories of them…

‘…I was obsessed with being gone in all but mind

sharing in the mourning with my loved ones left behind –

but I’m still here. Still in the shade. A shadow visible.

Sometimes I wonder whether I was ever here at all.’

That winter when I was a ghost

Haunting those I loved the most

Haunted by the desire to be

Absent, mourned, my brother despaired:

If you’re like this for wanting to be dead

You might as well be, he said –

Somehow these harsh words gave me strength

To stay and mourn myself at length.

Sometimes I wonder whether I was ever here at all...

I suppose most breakdowns come around

and peter-out without us knowing it.

This is my most troubled confession

and I confess it to this empty page

in hope of absolution…

then I remind myself of that old school hymn…

Do not be afraid…

strange how some tunes stay with you,

their chords carved in your memory

like a chilling primal threnody….

…my story is a garbled threnody grizzled

as windswept stone of our Cornish non-home

from home, blistered, pockmarked

stony face like a Narnian Gnome

I saw in many aspects from many angles,

stood on my bed upstairs where the beam

slanted over the window-ledge just to

get a different perspective on things…

here isolation bred introspection

leading to final alienation –

an outsider lost outside –

first port of call: an ambulance drive

on a sunny school day afternoon

to get my treatment from the brain expert

in a two-way mirrored room.

Doctor Vorster went to Glorcester

to study a patient’s problems;

he fell in a puddle right up to his muddle

so kept up a scrapbook of them.

My therapeutic sanctuary was in slate-skied

Liskeard, a pencil smudge of grim urbanity

lost in time in the hinterland mysteries

of the Cornish countryside – a characterless

place, grizzled, tin-mine face, one might

call forboding or dour, if it weren’t so

commonplace; seagulls mysteriously

encircled it even though it was nowhere

near the sea – an obscurity as was

my mind in those dark clinging days for I

was stricken before my disorder’s invention:

the odious OCD.

Ah, so what could they do with me

but guinea-pig my mind, deposit me

on a silent carpet before a psychiatrist

(not a psychologist, a psychiatrist he’d insist) –

there he’d sit, a jackdaw in the ruins of my mind,

eyes watching like the rook outside Cock Robin’s.

So why aren’t you going to school?

My lights were on, more-so than most –

no gormless fool as other kids would call me

in sporadic bouts of bullying when they could be

bothered – they ultimately gave up: I admitted

to no reaction, betrayed no hurt pride, there was

no point bullying me, I bullied myself, my

ghostliness was outside their limited daily

spectrum – I was off school more than my

meal-ticket dinners meted to me

at stale sta-press reeking lunch, courtesy

of my stigmatic meal ticket – my erratic

attendance now the stuff of legend – most

days I’d have black thoughts for brunch,

the same every morning, the same stolid dish

obsessively processed, masticated

like a hair-bone splintered fish.

First hour in the morning I’d hover by

reception waiting for parents to ring

to reassure me they were still living.

The genie in the bottle of my thoughts

was choking in his all-consuming brine…

xiii. Absence In Residence

Time to stand on my own two feet,

at last the artist in me stands apart, asserts

his start, stares ambition in the face aware

that this could be his most fateful stare

as he slowly ascends a slippery stair

to vain self-actualization…

but first to get away, cut adrift for the sake

of straining sanity – first to assert his intellectual

stamina that it can stand as tall as his brother’s,

can stand alone, time for him to transcend

his assumed station relative to kin…

University stamps its mark on my mind

shimmering through mists of lost time:

it’d been a long snail-haul for me to make my way

to the red-brick of Redherring University,

second-rate but one of the first fifteen,

asserting itself through its history

to stand apart from its Oxford roots,

just like a younger brother growing into the size

of his older brother’s outgrown shoes…

but the stifling life of study, initiations in drink

and uninspired sexual liaisons lead

to a Gentleman’s Degree in the ancient history

of Athens and Rome, soon time to come home

thumping down to reality with a bite –

significant, again, in his absence was he

at the graduation ceremony – a Bachelor of Arts,

the fallen disciple of academia but the

up-and-coming apostle of unpublished poetry…

the prolific absentee: missed his lectures as he

missed his schooling, always an outsider

unconsciously, but with a self-effacing instinct

which ironically stamped his presence on

an ever-frustrated authority driven

to sheer exasperation by his invisibility….

one of life’s reclusive recusants…

always sailing close to the wind…

blowing him this time to the Brighton lights,

the town that never shuts, bustling by the sea

with scuttle of mock-bohemian rock-pool activity,

a perpetually plagiarizing bazaar

whose protagonists refused to grow up

like Sixties’ refugees, its shifting fashions,

stylus-hissing Motown-driven Modism,

shops, cafes, kitch, sanctuaries, second-hand

book-shop bursting stucco shelves of terraces,

retro labyrinthine Laines – here in this

self-rejuvenating cavalcade of music, booze,

joss sticks, buff lattes, cocaine,

artistically-charged dreadlocked aggression,

class divides like slashed six-seaters

sofa-surfing addict-riddled curbs,

this place of youth, aspiring/despairing young,

littered with arts clubs, book-shelved pubs,

beckoned with its stand-up poetry nights

for any poetaster worth his salt to take the mic…

but years of smoke-filled writing rooms,

dead-end jobs, commuting fumes,

seagulls screaming in the night

brought him to lows of limbo days,

lack of sleep, sleeping pill poisoning,

staying awake into the little hours

of every weekend till mounting poems

and stress brought with it need to rest:

from school to work there are common threads:

clambering into winter out from warm beds…

that old phantom Unemployment beckoned

soon following on from it, a crisis,

long over due since the first – a test

to ascertain his eligibility for

an official, government-sanctioned rest,

on the dole of the despairing, recently

attributed his own pet disorder, depressed, yes,

nay, suicidal, but still not enough

to score 10 on the point system – only 8

out of 10, only 80% suicidal -

means he’s back to meagre means

and the search for unfulfilling employment…

xiv. Dawn - A Truant’s Day Off

It started with school, prison-like school,

the obsessive desire to escape, but now

no visible confines cramping me in,

nothing as simple as struggling all day

for the paradise of home-time, now comes

a darker time when I’d long for another

home inside myself: true peace of mind,

which I learnt I’d never find at home –

the suffocation and torment spent at school

had been simply a metaphor for existence

as a whole: I longed to escape time’s limits

of any man-made and natural form:

school, home, family, love, duty, thought, death –

(my asthmatic rehearsal for which made it

more immediate) I longed to escape myself.

But there’s no sure way to escape yourself

except the flight of suicide – the sin of despair

or twisted pride, snuffing yourself out

is no sure way out, it doesn’t solve the nagging

shibboleth of premeditated death….

all there is is to contemplate it, then distract

yourself and find a quiet way to die without

showing it – to just be, exist, not mentally,

just bodily, join in the mouse-wheeling spin

of life, make pettiness, tedium, routine

your mind’s comfortable medium, beatitude,

and cease your questioning….

no one will come and wave a wand only a finger

at your witless face; a billion ways to banish

phantasms, to placate the furies you failed

  to outwit –

they’ll offer you pills, two-way window-sills,

ways to stall panic, cast out the manic,

but it’ll still bide there, that nameless despair,

and nag you and nibble your brain till its numb;

no pill can bring this spell undone –

believe in behavioural therapy, keep its bumping

efforts as your bible and before long you’ll be

benumbed, live no more obsessively,

thought-stopping your second nature…

but for the time being the conundrum is OCD…

Remember to read the label, remember

the old proverb of bemused experience

and you’ll soon become another guinea-pig

to the intolerance and prejudice

consigns your illness to obscurity,

till someone comes to prescribe the answers

to neurosistory…

till that far distant, edifying day

I must make sail with the stitched brocade

of high moral expectation, mock-

martyr patchwork idealism,

and plough through waves of thought-mutation,

self-forming, morphing abstract seas

imprison me in liberties…

something has to go, to give, you must give

to receive, giving’s good, you must sacrifice

what you cherish the most to grasp the grail

of the moment’s immortality…to carpe diem

the split seconds’ sense of infinity,

to become symbiotically

all that inspires me, to forever be

spiritually stimulated, spine-shivered without limit

to the deathless score of a universe’s strings…

forget about life and it’s limited things…

spirit off out of time where the clocks have wings…

but I’ll plummet in time, the magnetism

of gravity, the force of obsession tugs me

back to earth with a bump through its atmos

-fear, same chain of thought, the botched

paradox of existence (re: being lost) …

I can’t enjoy anything that must end;

infinite thoughts and feelings with limit!

Mortality’s labyrinth trails bend on bend

but leads only to what is in it!

But I’d rather scratch on like a rat in a maze

or a mouse round a wheel

than reach the feared exit

that doubles as entrance…

no choice but to puzzle on while the clock

ticks forward wishing to tock back,

pause, stop, take stock, control, contain,

come to terms, it wrings its hands

bruised by Time’s pulse, pink and raw

like the hands of a compulsive scrubber…

What’s the time…?

nearly time…

till then we little innocents

dodder on hop-scotching thoughts

trip on skipping tight-ropes looping

round us rainbow hoops we spin

to keep from crashing down;

round in circles clapping hands

the smack of infant singing stings

red ears burning, chanting our

preventative of verse….

feed a cold, starve a fever,

feed a fever, starve a cold,

starve a fever, feed a cold,

starve a cold, feed a fever,

feed a cold, starve a fever…

…so scream all of us!

Feed A Cold, Starve A Fever

Composite parts:

i. Old Come Down

ii. Obsessive-Confessive Disorder

iii. English Martyrs RC School

iv. What’s The Time Mister Wolf?

Losing My Soul - Nerves

v. Soul Phobia

The Blackboard – The Truant’s Day Off –

Intrusive Thoughts – Outside the Windscreen –

The Drive – The Absentee – Always Away - Misplaced – Sunday Dusk

vi. The Fathoming

The False Confession – Candles & Anglicans –

The Two Way Mirror

vii. Feeling Distant

viii. School & Avoiding It

ix. C is for Compulsive

Transubstantiation – Holy Roofs –

Torments of the Damned – The Rosary Beads

x. Grandma – Death’s First Awakenings

xi. Intrusive Blue – Digression to my brother

Gules Saltire, Azure Rampant

xii. Adrift from Kin

A Prophet Hath No Honour…- Absences –

No One Home – My Life in the Shade

xiii. Absence in Residence

Binds and Threads

xiv. Dawn - A Truant’s Day Off

Infinite Things

Invented terms: ‘Phobiclinic’; ‘schoolphobia’; ‘soulphobia’; ‘prognostises’; ‘neurosins’; ‘neurosistory’; ‘phantasmasising’ etc.

“…an astonishing sequence in fourteen composite parts, takes on the put-down phrase “confessional poetry” up front, by subtitling the poem ‘Confessions of an Absentee’. What follows in this densely packed but clear and cogent poetry, is a first person outpouring of someone suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in which the medium is also the message. Morrison may be subject to OCD himself but the poetry…is not at all an uncontrolled splurge, and the considerable skills required to construct, pace and sequence a sixty eight page poem are everywhere in evidence. …the assurance and energy of thought and the variety of imagery commands one’s interest throughout”

– Graham High, Poetry Express

“Vivid in the immediacy of its description and very moving”

– John Welch, The Many Press

"By turns, sensitive, amusing, witty and touching" -

John Ballam, New Hope International

"Alan Morrison is a new but electric voice on the British poetry scene. Opening Feed A Cold, Starve A Fever is like stepping into a strange eerie world where internal and external reality converge, are juxtaposed, separate and then re-fuse.

  Seeing the ‘specialness’ inherent in ordinary phenomena is the essence of the poet’s art and the unfolding of his personal ‘take’ is the principal delight of reading good work. Morrison’s work is an interesting mixture of innocence and experience.

Morrison has a ‘voice’ (“All that poets can have”, as Auden said).

The ‘force of obsession tugs me’ Morrison writes, and the same force tugs the reader along compulsively through this saga of self-exploration. Morrison does not flinch about ‘coming out’ as a sufferer from obsessive compulsive disorder: for this too he deserves the high praise his poetry demands" - Barry Tebb