(a cul de sac of poems etc),

 

old found blog

EMPATHY

the evolution of recovery............... poems,essays,paintings, and photos of humanity

Sunday, 12 June 2011

(a cul de sac of poems etc),

www.adrianfox.org

                                                                                                                                        

BAY A

The tree

In the mirror

By the pebble-

Dashed wall

Looks cold

Dark naked

and alone.

SYNDROME

I’m reaching in and out  
beyond this locked-in-

syndrome. 

Beyond
the hum-drum lunch
box of tablets
and this overcast sky                             by Adrian fox

Imperfection 

is the language 


of art.

Yet why not say what happened.
                                                                       robert lowell

      

                                 
THE RIVER OF  TEARS

At the front door of  Cheshire mews there’s a summer seat beyond the sentimental snowdrops and the gardens of tranquillity, inside reality lives a guy who took a stroke who’s now in a wheelchair living in this centre of independent living. In limbo in between the hospital and the real world, he was in his early forties when he took the stroke the genes were in his family so there was no one to blame for being paralysed lying on his back in hospital for a year with a symptom the medical profession call locked-in-syndrome.

You can see him now flitting to and fro between the bedroom and his computer communicating with friends online now because his world was slowed in motion  

And the world carried on in its way and friends drifted into their able bodied lives,

He spends his day alone.   One day he was sitting by the bed reading a book and he fell and woke up in intensive care.  He spent almost a year in hospital paralysed learning how to talk and dress.  He’s been out of hospital for a year now living in an independent living centre before moving out into the community.  He is still visiting a rehab centre recovering from the stroke that damaged his speech and his right side he wears a splint on his right leg and has learned to write and paint with his left hand.

If you sit on that summer seat you can watch his world go by.   Put your foot in his splint and watch his world in slow motion go from a free spirit to a world of miscommunication.  To see him now you wouldn’t believe that once he was a published poet with two books, the verbal arts officer for Armagh and beyond, inspiring others running creative writing classes.  It’s as if two worlds exist side by side like two flowing rivers.   One is an able-bodied river twisting and turning on its way to the sea and the other has been dammed up by the ignorance of a lock them away society.  A flow of disabled misunderstanding as if we were still in the middle ages.  Its as if these two worlds exist in different times, its just like the olden days as if we live in a mindset of lock them away out of the view of life.

I think we have to live side by side to change the stigma that exists.  Be like a web-cam on his wheelchair and go up and down high and low ramps because the DOE don’t get advice from a disabled person.  You try going into a disabled toilet with a half an inch to spare on each side and the mirror set for someone who stands with more thought for a milking parlour than a disabled toilet and that’s a hospital.

Go into the footage of his world struggling to pick things up those fallen, things we take for granted, as a great poet once said ‘its human to look down on things that have fallen’.  Here’s a little exercise, whatever ever hand you use try to use the opposite for a day then you’ll see what I mean.  Sit on that summer seat and watch his world that has been turned upside down. Watch him stumble on the bridge of recovery you don’t have to look too hard to see him scream like the man in Edward munches painting.   Pretend this is your world:  you have just woke into a world of dreams, the walls are the floor and light is dark and you wake in a hospital bed and you feel your body parts to make sure nothing is missing.  The only image you remember is all the lights have been switched off like going through a tunnel of drips and blurred faces wearing an oxygen mask.   A group of doctors stand around your bed asking you to lift limbs that didn’t move and try to say words that form in your head but not in your mouth.  Its like the film with David invent going up the escalator to judgement day these doctors are your judge and jury.  As if the record skipped and missed a beat and he woke up in this world, it was as if the world he came from was just a dream, the last 40 years were a figment of his imagination.  I woke up and it felt like I was in a cartoon then I realised there were no words coming out of my mouth.

It felt like I had been in an accident but I didn’t feel sore, I recall the blurred images of my ex-wife and mother in law and my young sons frightened look leaning over to kiss me.  I remembered then -sitting by the bed reading and I fell, crawling into my mothers room asking her what was happening as I thought I was having a heart attack trembling all over and she said I think your having a stroke and phoned the doctor.  I was lost in that groove and I woke in an alien world, even the doctors didn’t know what to do with me as the advances in medical science and keeping people has moved onto another level but lets build an infrastructure of empathy, years ago people like me would have died.  I am in limbo, it was as if I was between life and death as if I had been reborn into this world again an adult.  My past went through my mind all scratched and grainy like a pathe newsreel, I remembered the words of my dead father singing:  ‘you don’t have to be a baby to cry’ ringing in my head now like profound wisdom.  I’ve cried more this last while adjusting to my new way of life than I ever did as a child, before I tell you about the adjustments to my life please let me tell you about the world that seems like a dream.  Maybe my emotional hand grenade imploded and tore my inner canvas I hope I can relay this debris.   I had my own agenda, I was a free spirit I was spontaneous and impulsive and lived life to the full.

CARE IN THE COMMUNITY

(a cul de sac poem)

a dog could walk into                                     

my disabled dungeon

morning noon and night

panting, sniffling in-

haling and exhaling.

It’s a pity there’s no

Dogs for disability

In northern Ireland.

It’s a dead end.

I’ve cried rivers of tears trying to adjust to my new way of life of wheelchairs, cares, physio, nurses, speech therapy and hospital appointments.  Excuse the pun but its time to stand up and be a big boy and face it that your no longer a free spirit its as if my mind and my body were in to different time zones.  Once upon a time I was a son, a husband, a father.  That Saturday morning in April 2005 was like releasing an emotional hand grenade.  Before this my life was running smoothly I loved what I was doing teaching poetry.  Poetry and literature filled my inner sanctum, seamus heaney said poetry has a special ability to redress the spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces, poetry and art has pulled me through my darkest days.  I was a published poet with two books and working on my third, I never wanted for anything except those silly unrealistic dreams you have before sleep.  It seems I had what people strive for: a beautiful girl who loved me three beautiful children, an ex and me wife of eighteen years, ok things ran their course but we had a great time.  I was sitting by the bed reading a book missing my girlfriend who was in Slovenia at a teacher’s conference suddenly out of the blue I was on the floor trembling.   Its now four years since my stroke and im sore crying at the changes I had to deal with and it seems were still locked in a middle aged mindset,  im not following a funeral cortege down the road of negativity.   I learnt that we all go through trauma, life is trauma whether we go through stroke cancer or puberty we are all united in trauma.   Don’t worry about others-be yourself- if you want to be sad be sad don’t wear a sentimental false face.   We are all alone and suffering and the gaps between us are only bridged by our empathy, ok I might be writing this from a wheelchair but it’s a positive one and any moment now something will happen.

                                                                                                                                           

      

MONKEY POLE......... (the evolution of recovery)

The sun throws

a shimmering

shadow on my wall.

A shadow within a shadow,

an image within an image

like a heat hazed mayhem.

I ponder a book

on the graphic works of

M.C. ESCHER a man way

ahead of his time, his drawings

of rippled water are like

the splash of shadowed summer

on my wall. The evolution

of his surrealism must have been like

the diagrams of Darwins mind,

you have to go down to come up.

Birds become fish and fish become sky

spanning acres of land.

Life is there in that shadow,

Dancing leaves upon my wall.

My carer put me to bed at 9pm (Friday night)

 and left me to play with my monkey pole.

My home is like a hospital

there is a wet room and

and a wheelchair and rails for me

to pull up from but not

pull down.

      

CONSCRIBED

In Memory of John Hewitt

I drove down the blue stone

And sat by my sisters grave

Waiting for grief to rise.

Poetry comes from the inside

its like trying to make sense

of nothing and make it flow

on the page.

Sitting here beside a river

watching memory meander

and surface there in the current

to wave hello, goodbye.

Rest there Steph and sleep

memory awake.

I am here at home in this

Moment NOW.  These

streets are my glens

these valleys are my cathedrals.

I conscribe this poem having

Breakfast of toast tea and tablets

by an un-stained window. 

Exiled by the space beyond

My blue door.

DISPOSABLE DEBRIS

I fold into a foetus position

And wait for a carer to care.

After I’m washed and dressed

And left at the window watching

A blackbird, my guardian angel

Looking over his realm.

I sit here in the wheelchair in

The kitchen doing nothing.

They say there’s no such thing

As nothing, I watch the leaves

Breeze under a blue sky.

This must be how a prisoner

Feels, the silence must be to

Silent.  At least I’m almost in

This community.  The waves

Of cars go by, this automated

River flows to the roundabout

And back again.

You have to go down to come up

Everything disintegrates into nothing.

Man can only cry or laugh into

The well of time.  Everything we see,

Touch, taste or smell becomes

disposable debris.

I remember when I awoke from

My tunnel of darkness in a hosp-

Ital bed paralysed with locked-in-

Syndrome.   Hallucinating on drugs

To keep me alive thinking:

 there was a man behind me cutting

up bodies with a chainsaw throwing

the parts into a skip, I was next.

I gripped the blankets and took this

white knuckled ride breaking

into a cold sweat i even thought

the nurses were going to kill me.

My mind was like gruelly porridge

Or scrambled egg.  Its been six years

Now since that moment my mind

Has began to form into place, a more

Spacious form. 

I’m sitting in a wheelchair in an adopted car

Watching the rain ripple the black-water.

In bold red letters against a white

Back-ground it says: 

Dead end

No wash.

 

empathy

Nucella

‘Imperfection is the language of art’

                                       Robert Lowell

I was reading your biography by Ian Hamilton;

During the 15th chapter I discarded the bookmark,

A postcard I bought in Galway.

The title was: Happy Dogwelk, (Nucella):

A finger, the pale shade of marine life,

Blending with starfish and seaweed, pointing

To the seabed.

Now I know where I stand in your intricate

Hard waters.

I sit here at the dining room table, filled

With whisky, beer and poetry.

I look up into a mirror that shows my way

upstairs, if I dare move from this spot

And chance my way into the reflection

of the first day of March.

Then, only then, will I descend the stairwell

Of my youth.

"Dolphin"

" My eyes have seen what my hand did.”

I wish I had known you,

Even to say hello in the street.

To know why I cry on your words,

To know why I cry, full stop.

NORTH WEST PASSAGE

I.M  of Michael hartnett

Rise little blackbird

To the top of the tree

Your song is witness

To pain and joy.

            

The sky was like a Turner painting

A dusky pink hue, hanging melancholy.

I’m planning to drive to Donegal

Tomorrow and listen to the Lambchop C.D,

This music still drifts me in and out

Of reality.  Driving down the motor-

Way behind a horse box as if the horses

head came from a painting into my imagination

galloping bareback through the Bann and the Black-

water.

Below a bridge where children wave

Across the Sperrins past the raised ruins

And the raised to the ground ruins of history

On the north west passage through the Fairy

Water into another world embroidered

In memory, thatched in time. 

 

 

 

 

THE OTHER COUNTRY

for Carol Ann Duffy

The other country is:  

A silhouetted hill

by a lake in a night sky.

The mountains are the shape

of a naked woman from your

dreams. 

I woke up sleeping on

a steering wheel with V.W

imprinted on my forehead. 

I drove north and detoured

left always left around a lake

and started back where I began

in dreams.

The star in the western sky

flickered above my manger

Reading Keats, O’Solitude

and your touchable dreams.

It seems as if Keats seen  9/11

in the first three lines of his poem.

As if nothing has changed

in the sentimental poetic

span of time.

I dwell in murky buildings

but my soul it is free. 

In here I see the wonder

that is really the blue me. 

SPACE CADET

‘History is a nightmare from

Which we are trying to awake’

                                 James Joyce

I woke up between floors

Caught sight of my sight

Awakening you’d thought

that I had seen a ghost

wide eyed and in-

tense.

It’s as if this poem is

Falling into tense falling

Into this moments form

Rising from the dead.

My coma, my tunnel

Of darkness within dark-

ness my event horizon

The light this poem

falling into place. 

I kicked back  against nature

I kicked back and back until

I stared back into me like that

Thing on that bridge in that

Painting scream. 

I dreamt this dream years

and years ago, it reoccured

through the trauma of Belfast

in the early 70s, Reoccurring

then and now:

I was being chased along

a corridor by a wild rabid dog

frothing at the mouth, It grew

darker and darker as my lights

went out until I seen an exit sign

Pushed the bar and fell:

Hurtling through space this

Space. The tock of the clock

Ticked me into this time at

this place, yesterday today.

Empathy rules ok