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)
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.
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
I considered the grass growing
