Duplex for the Sick & Tired

Kay Ulanday Barrett

after Jericho Brown

A poem can spasm, stretch, but it can let salve in. There aren’t enough pages for the longing. There aren’t enough pages for the longing drenched in medicine bottles and ice packs.

Drenched in medicine bottles and ice packs, our aches sing beyond joints and stethoscopes in denial. Those who sing beyond joints and stethoscopes in denial, how do the symptoms stack your days?

Let’s name the stacks of dangerous symptoms: News coverage, the state, strangers who say the pandemic is over. News coverage, the state, strangers who say the pandemic is over as I dream about a world that celebrates all of us.

As I dream about a world that celebrates all of us fully, Let’s allow poems to stretch. Let the salve in.

Postcard Written on my Windowsill at 1:37am, Thessaloniki

Charitini Lekou

Two nyctophiles stargazing, a few light-years apart. Tonight, they glitter like my amber ring used to. Yes, I saw it around your finger when you last spoke to me—a stranger who knows about your sleep paralysis. But since you asked, this room looks the same: flat surfaces crammed with amigurumi, walls suffocated by posters; Every book has a cracked spine now. And since you’re wondering, my heart is still soft for Austen, who understands perpetual estrangement. I’m still fluent in F.R.I.E.N.D.S quotes. But now I’m not ashamed when I swear, or blast terrible nu-metal, or tell boys I play video games. You were a petal-pink bruise that branded my wrist, then faded, once I stopped feeling for a pulse. All is well.

P.S. I hope the stars shine as bright on your end of the city. Please, look the other way next time we brush shoulders.

Wild Beauty

jessica Care moore

Such a wild beauty extracted from black ashes (echo) A series of calculated crashes

I simply call them romances.

I photograph you in my bed in the morning I miss you and you never leave Your scent remains, unbelievably I pray to all the Gods and my lies still don’t believe in me.

You dance inside the snow Slush beneath your boots We talk philosophy and hardcover books Sometimes i find the heart you took and carry It around, a handsome crook A saviour among a crown of thorns and petals never worn Of flowers dead and letters never sent

Did you see the way the summer wept Did you feel my bones break inside your hands

?

How fragile are the strong and mad Who dare to wrap themselves in flags

Sewn by slaves and walked over graves (echo) Jessica, you say, you must behave.

Yourself. I don’t know what to do with wealth Cept spend it on a love affair or place bright flowers In my hair.

Just tell me what color I should wear to a funeral with no people there?

Bodies asleep deep in my chest Kiss me, since we are all that’s left In love, in fear, scared half to death

Humans aren’t so interesting my son insists We have no wings. No power beyond our century We are given less, and still we sing. We dress the part I keep the veil, and pawn the rings.

I want to steal Saul’s new hat and Dante’s bright green boots My fashionable brothers.

You. Brooklyn bridge. I am hula hoop Swirling dervish in a perfect suit Oh my love, my memory swoons.

Such a wild beauty extracted from black ashes (echo) A series of calculated crashes I simply call them beautiful massive Oh wait, I believe I wrote romances.

Protecting me from the brutality, the wounded savage You, that’s me. Pointing fingers deliciously. Baby, please hold onto me.

I only want love to hold me for ransom. I know he is. They are all so handsome. Perhaps, a very good looking cancer. I call your name, pray you don’t answer.

Such a wild beauty.

Oak Skin

Kris Ringman

Every wood I’ve stepped into has a watchful crone, a witch whose skin resembles the bark of an ancient oak.

She spins her wool by moonlight, she threads her fingers through the moss, and knows exactly which mushrooms to pick.

I don’t need my hearing to feel the changes in the wind when she slips out of the gaps between the rocks and the trees, her voice

I feel in the roots I step on, in the stones I try to avoid with my bare feet that always manage to bruise me, test the calluses I’ve grown

with each stride I’ve taken through these trees. I’ve sung to her beneath the arms of the beeches reaching towards the birches, though she never

listens to me. I imagine she laughs at the tune I cannot keep, before moving on, gathering weeds by the stars, mixing potions to use on people

like me, who would walk into her arms gladly, wishing she were an old aunt I could visit to learn everything about this world she keeps to herself.

Leningrad

Osip Mandelstam, translated by John Dougherty

I’ve returned to my city, familiar to tears, To veins, swollen glands of childhood years

You’ve returned here to Leningrad, so quickly gulp down Fish oil from the riverside lamps in the town

Recognize all the sooner the day in December Where mixed with black tar is an egg yolk of sulphur

Petersburg, I still do not yet want to die You have my phone numbers, please give them a try

Petersburg, I still have an address that boasts Surroundings filled with the voices of ghosts

I live on the dark stairs, and inside my head Sounds a bell torn out from the flesh of the dead

And all through the night I await my dear guests Moving door chains, like shackles, their coming attests

Shipwreck

One of mine, from way back (it was once used as a song lyric)

My story is not of love lost but of love never found. Not for me the glory of Titanic, I am a hulk that ran aground. Rusting, red and hateful, a cargo of filth inside; I rage against the sea that sank me and all the hopes that died.

I am a shipwreck you don’t want to be near. A shipwreck - be any place else but here.

You told me that you were a beacon,                                                                      (that) you could lead me safe to port                                                                      but suspicion clouded good fortune                                                                        and I repaid your kindness with hurt.                                                                      I steered away from the light                                                                      because I could not bear to see.                                                                              I chose the rocks and the night                                                                              and the anger and hatred in me.

I am a shipwreck you don’t want to be near. A shipwreck - be any place else but here.

Is it too late for a rescue? Am I fated to drown? I’m scared by the coldness of water                                                                      and the silence I hear all around.                                                                            If I swim for the shore, will I reach it?                                                                      Might you be waiting there still?                                                                              The smart move is surely to leave me                                                                    and let the sharks have their fill.

I am a shipwreck you don’t want to be near. A shipwreck - be any place else but here.

If I sent up a flare would you see it?                                                                        I might dye it red with my blood.                                                                      Would you hear if I made a distress call?                                                                Or have I lost you for good?                                                                                    It’s cold in the water. I feel it;                                                                                my blood is too thin and too old.                                                                          So this is dying, I guess;                                                                                        it reminds me that once I was young,                                                                      I was bold.

Don’t weep for me now I’m not worth it; there’s salt enough in the sea. Save your tears; you may need them for someone much better than me.

September 1999 © Damian

from “Parallax”

Nancy Cunard

This thin edge of December Wears out meagrely in the Cold muds, rains, intolerable nauseas of the street. Closed doors, where are your keys? Closed hearts, does your embitteredness endure forever? Torpidly Afternoon settles on the town,                       each hour long as a street—

In the rooms A sombre carpet broods, stagnates beneath deliberate steps: Here drag a foot, there a foot, drop sighs, look round for nothing, shiver. Sunday creeps in silence Under suspended smoke, And curdles defiant in unreal sleep. The gas-fire puffs, consumes, ticks out its minor chords— And at the door I guess the arrested knuckles of the one-time friend, One foot on the stair delaying, that turns again.

Walls

CP Cavafy

Without consideration, without pity, without shame

they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.

I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.

Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.

Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

Mark this Wall

Michael Magee 

(An unsent letter form a Roman soldier posted along Hadrian's Wall)

I'm lonely here the places I didn't go to defend this place have given me a headache for twenty years or so.

The underpinnings in gorse tiny flowers of thyme grow through it, these stones have bled more blood than men and yet I'm full of hope.

Its willow weaving time, at Christmas we will decorate: celebrate Saturnalia, drink toasts to spill into the new year hope for a changing of the guard.

The men it posted here from Syria to Africa who stood as sentry through winter's outnumbered days wish you were here, and here, and here.

Thoughts on Suicide: 4am

One of mine

When I read / hear that X, or Y or Z, took his life (and it usually is his life) because the balance of his mind was disturbed, it grates on me. It's grated on me for years. It grates on me because it denies the lived experience of the individual and bolsters the smug, self-satisfied (unexamined) narrative of the powerful 'collective'.

When a fish swims in poisoned water, it dies.

People commit suicide not because the balance of their minds is disturbed but because the balance of their life is disturbed.

Faced with problems, we speak, sometimes of getting things 'straightened out'. We should do more of it. Not just speak about it, but do it. Our current understanding cosmology / physics describes the planets as travelling in straight lines through curved space. Well, I think that if your life becomes distorted enough, suicide is perfectly rational. Suicide can be a straight line in a fucked up world.

There is a very strong resistance to acknowledging that our lives are becoming increasingly distorted, that the water we swim in is becoming increasingly poisoned. It serves some powerful vested interests to say otherwise - just as sewage companies don't want to be caught poisoning rivers, or agribusinesses polluting waterways with chemical run-offs, so the powerful don't want us to see the fundamental flaws in the current set up.

It suits their purposes if you continue to think the dead fish were weak / sick / unhealthy. And, of course (by extension) that you are not - you're still swimming in the sewage and believing it's Evian.

Not seeing it, personally.

The same game is widespread. Have you been on resilience training at work? Plenty of my NHS colleagues will have been. The main point of resilience training (as far as I can see) is to make you believe that the stresses you feel are an indication of your inability to cope rather than evidence of the unsustainable burdens placed on you.

Or there's the 'sickness policy' that evolves into 'supporting attendance'. The message here being that you are not ill, rather that you're failing in your obligation to your employer.

If you believe all the above, so much the better for them, so much the worse for you.

I am not looking to deny individual agency in suicide. Or anywhere else in life. Very few of us have absolutely no power to choose /act.

What I'm saying is that our opportunities to exercise personal choices / our power to effect change is being systematically eroded. And, further, that the sense of collective agency, which can effect changes to the system itself, is being deliberately dismantled. (Rights to protest, rights to vote, the simple fact of being ill, the right to speak the truth to power). Think of the apartment dwellers who are made personally liable to pay to have their death-trap properties made safe, instead of the developers and builders who made their homes unsafe. Or think of the incandescent rage directed at Insulate Britain protestors rather than the leviathans who are driving the climate catastrophe. What, exactly, is the problem about making homes more energy efficient? About having a planet that is not simultaneously in flames and under water?

But, back to the individual and personal. When you remove support, when you make it difficult to access help, when you characterise people as weak, when you heap coals on their heads, when you make their world increasingly shit, some people will choose suicide. Don't act surprised. Don't paint a sad face. It makes perfect sense.

What doesn't make sense is ignoring the spiralling crisis and subscribing to "I'm alright, Jack"; is colluding with the people who characterise suicide as weakness; with those who pour petrol on flames; with those who denature life and impose ever-greater burdens.

Suicide is not easy to survive, for those close to the person who elects it. It can bring almost unimaginable levels of guilt: 'I should have known'; 'I ought to have spotted that'; 'I should have done more'. Keep away from that. Acknowledge the feeling but don't indulge it. Standing alongside someone in their suffering is not the same as making yourself responsible for it.

And being angry at the person (and you very well might be) won't help, either. Feel it, yes, but lay it aside as soon as you can.

We cannot safeguard all that we love. It is not within our power.

What is within our power is to challenge the narrative; to demand (and effect) the change that we need; to straighten things out; to ease burdens; to provide support; to refuse to be complicit.

Don't pollute the water we all swim in.

Don't engineer black holes for others to be sucked in to.

Remember those who are overpowered. They're us.

On The Balcony

DH Lawrence (has a better view than me, and a significant other, but still I'm fond of mine)

In front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost ribbon of rainbow;

And between us and it, the thunder;

And down below in the green wheat, the labourers

Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat.

You are near to me, and your naked feet in their sandals,

And through the scent of the balcony's naked timber

I distinguish the scent of your hair: so now the limber

Lightning falls from heaven.

Adown the pale-green glacier river floats

A dark boat through the gloom - and whither?

The thunder roars. But still we have each other!

The naked lightnings in the heavens dither

And disappear - what have we but each other?

The boat has gone.

Shipwreck

One of mine, from September 1999. A friend used this as a lyric for a song he composed. 

My story is not of love lost

but of love never found.

Not for me the glory of Titanic,

I am a hulk that ran aground.

Rusting, red and hateful,

a cargo of filth inside;

I rage against the sea that sank me 

and all the hopes that died.

I am a shipwreck you don’t want to be near. A shipwreck - be any place else but here.

You told me that you were a beacon,

(that) you could lead me safe to por

but suspicion clouded good fortune

and I repaid your kindness with hurt.

I steered away from the light

because I could not bear to see.

I chose the rocks and the night

and the anger and hatred in me.

I am a shipwreck you don’t want to be near. A shipwreck - be any place else but here.

Is it too late for a rescue?

Am I fated to drown?

I’m scared by the coldness of water

and the silence I hear all around.

If I swim for the shore, will I reach it?

Might you be waiting there still?

The smart move is surely to leave me

and let the sharks have their fill.

I am a shipwreck you don’t want to be near. A shipwreck - be any place else but here.

If I sent up a flare would you see it?

I might dye it red with my blood.

Would you hear if I made a distress call?

Or have I lost you for good?

It’s cold in the water. I feel it;

my blood is too thin and too old.

So this is dying, I guess;

it reminds me that once I was young,

I was bold.

Don’t weep for me now I’m not worth it; there’s salt enough in the sea. Save your tears; you may need them for someone much better than me.