I’ve spent much of my life close to people with various mental health conditions. The care they have received over the years – and the understanding they’ve experienced from others – has ranged from the gentle to the brutal. This poem was my attempt to understand one of the most brutal things of all that has happened to two people, in particular, who are very close to me. It was published in my debut collection, “A Long Way to Fall”, in 2013, and I’m honoured that it was also accepted for re-publication in Isabelle Kenyon’s seminal anthology “Please Hear What I’m Not Saying”, to raise funds and awareness for MIND.
(Photo: a view from my one and only visit (to date) to Shetland, which the metadata on the photo tells me was in 2009. A selkie place if ever there was one).
In the white room
a nurse holds my wrists,
dabs me with disinfectant-soaked cotton.
A kindly burning.
In the white room
I’m given a plastic cup
with a liquid that smells of blackberries
and tastes like soggy almonds.
In the white room
I’m allowed to dream
while two electrodes count the pulses in my brow,
two pens mark spikes on a chart.
And when I dream
the bed beneath me falls away
and I’m carried on cold fat rivers to the place
where the sea meets the sky;
and there I discover
I can unzip my human skin,
stretch into a world of seaweed and blue
with fingers made for swimming.
They dance with me,
my sisters, among the reefs
where watching eyes will never spy us out.
We touch noses, kiss underwater.
Our breath is bubbles
caught in a moonbeam’s glimmer,
our heartbeats follow the rising and falling
of every wave, each tide.
The dreaming stops.
I zip up my skin, return
to the white room. The too-bright world,
garish, cold in its glare.
I let them prod,
knowing they will never
unstitch me, never drown the aftertaste
of wet peat in my mouth.
