I Do Not Accept Drinks From Disapproving Men (A Hymn)

You got me when I was not looking, charged along the track without a warning

With unintended force you crashed into my calm

Pushed me to the very edge, I know you meant no harm

And I trust your well-meaning, your kindness-filled desire

To oil the machinations of us, to lift us ever higher

To clarify and reinstate our stations, yet I fell at every word you mentioned.

His words hit like a bowling ball - a strike for him, nothing for me at all

Knocked down with a clean fast sweep, tangled mess, feelings in a heap.

Winded, empty, helpless, confused, his meagre message left me bruised

Faux kindness ripped my soul to shreds, insides exposed, aching, raw and red

And no-one wants to see that - who wants to see that?

The entrails of despair and pain, pieces of gut chewed over and again

Till only sad acrid bile remains, semi-liquid, half-baked frame

Unfulfilled body collapses in again, spark kicked out; fuse blown again.

The force of each blow radiates through brittle bone

Teased, torn and tingled, every sinew, muscle, tendon

Tender parts provoked to rage, tissue flutters in wild daze

With saddened shudder veins vibrate, each artery impaled with desperate ache

Sorrowful shivers sent to every atom, naked cells quake suspiciously

This deadly sense of poisoned void trips me, tips me, closer to insanity. 

You disapprove because you feel that I have taken your love for granted

But this is not true, I value you and the trust we both have planted.

He disapproves because, well, I don’t know, but the disapproval itself is clear

Amidst these howling winds it’s bitter taste is all I hear.

Your words made me feel I was a failure; his words make me feel I’m a fool

Either way I am undone and on this unworthy cold spring night

I know that loneliness has won.

All signs of renewal have been suppressed like the hyacinth, forget-me-nots and starflower

She picked from the garden to comfort me with stems cut too short for water

Slow sacrifice to the drowning maid, instead, with attentive care we laid

White here, yellow, blue and purple there, petals pressed firm on to the page

Faces peer up as pages come down - crushed the life out of their colourful ways

Pushed and pressed to preserve past beauty, to keep them safe, these sorry souvenirs

Of what once was. Forget me not, but I know you will. And he will too I fear

(and would it have been worth it after all?)

Beneath love’s dark waves I am slipping, slipping, falling, drowning gasp of ocean air

Fills tired lungs, ache from crying, soothed by grave waters, suffocating

With death’s silent scream narrating.

All this love and no hope of salvation; all this love and no air to breathe

Not in these slow murky whirling depths, slowly strangled by malicious weeds.

All this love and no arms to cling to; all this love and no lips to kiss

No fingers to caress each moment, soothe with undulating bliss.

No heart to accept love and reciprocate feelings, to embrace and hold and welcome it home

Drowning with all these other lovers in all this love, yet I am here, alone.

We’re all alone with our unique obsessions, each lonely soul in its private passion

All this love and not a drop to drink; all this love our poor hearts to sink.

I want to scream ‘fuck off!’ at you, to push you away, away, away

Because the distance I already feel is more than I can bear today.

I want you gone because I need you here and I cannot have it my way

To have you here, it is forbidden, and what would our neighbours say?

I need to delete your omnipresence, unsubscribe from your daily views

Unfollow your voice on my video feed, block every last trace of you

Because you can do nothing for me now.. (it’s just me and the pain, again)..

His voice shakes. Is he laughing or crying? I can no longer tell, perhaps I never could

Perhaps all I knew were guesses at best - mere approximations of hopefulness

My heart harboured for him, from him, to you, to him, of you, of him

For you, from you and him, and you..

Can I only live this life if I erase him? How can I possibly live without you?

There is air on the surface, that much I know.

But for now, on this loneliest of nights

I will sink to the bottom and forget how to breathe.

And To Make An End...

...For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning...
T.S. Eliot

For those of us who tend to over-think almost everything, have an inbuilt obsession with attaining an unattainable perfection, and seem hell-bent on criticising every aspect of our tortured selves on a regular basis, the end of a year can feel like an impossibly difficult time. 

The expectation that everything will and should change for the better, is difficult to avoid. The predilection for ruminating on the past year's 'failures' and less than successful projects and relationships is rife and often overwhelming. As Charlotte Carpenter so succinctly puts it in her beautiful song Another Year - "...this trip around the sun, it ain't easy..."



I watch myself going through all these fears, disappointments and anxieties year after year and only seem to add to the chaotic mix of chemical imbalances by attempting to stop feeling the feelings that cause such pain but ultimately cannot be undone by undoing.

Having, by no small miracle, begun to put into practice the probably life-long lesson of allowing feelings - whether they feel helpful or less so - to flow through unhindered throughout this past year, I imagined that this year end would be less painful than the previous. Yet despite putting mental, emotional and situational safety barriers in place, I've found the crossover from 2019 to 2020 just as exhausting and full of disappointment with myself, one or two unfortunate others and with life itself.

Putting the past behind us as Eliot suggests in the wonderful quote above (and elsewhere in his Four Quartets piece), is no easy task and takes huge amounts of courage and trust in the eternal process of change. 

The idea of calling an end to one way of being and thereby allowing a new way to come forth, however, is very appealing and resonates loudly in my soul. Thus, I have allowed myself the miserable luxury of spending the day (and much of the previous night) immersed in all the sadness that came skulking out of the new year woodwork, ruminating over unhelpful thoughts and disappointments whilst simultaneously attempting to employ the art of observing feelings without too much judgement. 

It's been a long day but I feel ready to make an end and let the beginning roll in. I hope you do too.. x


P.S. The following extract from Burnt Norton, Part 1 of Eliot's Four Quartets (perhaps not intentionally) sums up the feelings of fear and anxiety that, perhaps necessarily, hang over this time of year poignantly. I also like how it (definitely unintentionally) evokes the Twittersphere quite beautifully.

...Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world...

Entanglement Theory

Long, long, long ago,
Beyond the scope of time,
Your shiny, spinning rock star
Collided into mine.
Left a meteoric scar
Across my cosmic heart –
A crater lying aeons deep
A lifetime’s width apart.

Far, far, far away.
Bonds that can’t be severed,
Bound my lonely heart to yours
Our orbits changed forever.
In a cold, dark, empty space
Our bodies out of time,
Knew we’d be together, love
Further down the line.

If the numbers all add up
And the cosmic maths is right,
The physics that is drawing us
Won’t give up the fight.
A million miles of galaxy
Can’t keep us apart –
We bleed the same blue star dust;
Same plasma in our hearts.

A promise made so long ago
Sends us spinning through the skies
In opposite directions –
You turn left and I spin right.
Yet we are still together,
Connections running deep -
The stories and the songs we share
Will bring you back to me.

Nothing can tear our hearts apart
Without forcing a hole
In the holy matter of time and space,
In the fabric of our souls.
And so our planets circle
Around the same bright star
In spirals of galactic love
That keep us near and far.

Interstellar longing,
A message from above:
Find your inner compass -
A universal Love.

The Papered Cracks

What is this pounding in my chest?
This hollowed out container, emptied
scoop by scoop; no vanilla tones here

only bitter spices, aniseed rising,
cinnamon smothering the airways,
coating sugar with lime.

Plates and bowls crashing heavily,
cupboard doors slammed shut too tight -
tightness in my chest implodes as

kitchen noise reverberates through the skull,
landmines collapse the heart’s will to live -
undermined, undernourished, underfed.

A repetition of epic proportions -
no portion too large to share.
Colour drains from all our faces.

Time stood still whilst pain kept falling,
washing away all sense of truth
leaving nothing but fear, catastrophised

upon the table, wooden boards laid
plank to plate - a guest house where
no-one wants to stay. Alone

in corners facing inwards, the child,
unhappy seeks redemption from the walls.
The papered cracks scream for attention

and a kindness that seems so obscure,
so impossible to reach, but I can see
it disappearing around each bend

and I follow, hopeful, scared but hope
will always be my friend even when
I can no longer feel his bones, fragile

pieces of him and me and him and them
ground down by the pressure cooker
releasing steam in erratic rhythms,

puffing and screeching her requirements,
her disappointments and regrets. Still
heaping overcooked piles of veg, steaming

hot as fire to burn your tongue -
stop the words from forming, throwing
us off our game. Whose turn is it now?

Biting down on bloody lips, whispered
words of attempted comfort evaporating
in the frosty air. Knives cutting

every string of emotion, all connections
severed at the nub, just below the bud -
there will be no flowering this year again,

no seasoning on this scorched flesh, dry
almost tasteless on the tongue and
who’s got yours now? So quiet,

tiptoeing over broken milk and spilled shells,
crunching precariously between the highs
and the oh, so low lows of teatime.