She Must Be Mad Read online

  ‘… What’s not there to be desired?’

  It’s all a constant conflict

  That speeds in every thought

  When I don’t feel so great

  It draws a pencil line above my head

  Much shorter than before

  It’s a voice that refuses to see growth

  And then backtracks for a minute

  And shouts that I’m taller than most

  Sometimes I need it to hear my own stupidity

  And sometimes it knocks a sizeable crack in my mental fragility

  Sometimes it feels like an illness

  And other times it feels like a super ability

  When I’m alone it’s easy to forget I am

  Because someone else is nattering away

  And if I had control of at least one of these voices

  I’ve got no idea what I’d say

  But maybe, it would be

  Right or wrong

  Fat or thin

  An inbetween of all these things

  They’ll quieten down when you realise

  You’re as strong to be so tough

  To see that all of you’s

  Enough.

  wonder of worry

  We become the wonder of worry

  Greasy in apologies

  Slithering around each other’s truths

  In a perfect eight-shaped double-headed noose

  Beer-foamed lips catch glints

  And glisten sticky awaiting calm

  That wills to be administered mouth to mouth

  As hands cover eyes and fingers rest in their brows

  We become the wonder of worry

  Wandering straight-edged

  Slack-lined, tongues untied, holding

  On to strawberry-coloured embarrassed

  Pink in the cheeks that we rouged from the tint of our hearts, hapless

  In spirit and gesture

  Cursing our history for being a chemical-stained mess

  But as you hold me in the crook of your arm and kiss my bruised head

  Our madness weighs a little less

  The wonder of worry is

  Teeth teetering trips of silence

  Locked lockets swinging open unasked

  Wittering over an expectation of now and love passed

  Past a parameter to shut down

  Slow down, bend down and under through branches we’ve extended

  Piling them high and climbing to a peak of united front splendid

  We become the wonder of worry

  A little lost in the unexpected

  But as we wonder together the worry becomes fragmented

  Halved and shared and further afloat

  There is a crescent smile on our lips

  And there’s nothing left to clear in our throats.

  amber meal

  Wipe a slick of whiskey from your lips

  The burning bitter now a tender kiss

  It is a supper of divine, an amber meal

  A glass to clink that dins out how to feel

  And when we fall back together again

  Which I’m certain shall be friends

  against the odds

  Please know

  This crash

  And cool of rocks is now my home

  climb

  Because you left me here to alone.

  I thought it wicked

  To offer out a space within you without offering its limit

  To dilute down all the hours by leaving in a minute

  I thought you wicked

  But in a mess of this elixir

  I still want you to see my splendour and lie within it.

  unidentified businessman

  Did you see his eyes?

  The way he looked at me

  I’ve seen that look before

  In doctor’s receptions and caught them in glass door reflections

  That inward moment you look outward to seek a connection

  With yourself through someone else

  Did you really see them?

  Blink and you’ll miss it

  A piece of ocean blue and an iris sunk in spirit

  Querying a view of judgment so explicit

  That you want to hold their two pearly glass pebbles

  And extract all of their battled past trembles

  And kiss it

  Smooch the notion of their preconceptions

  Cradle an ounce of the perfect they see as imperfections

  And make them look the other way

  Shoot back a glance

  That knocks their sallow tin man stance

  To ricochet

  To hand on your heart hand over your heart just for a minute in his day

  A head nod that doubles as a ‘I hope you’ll be okay’.

  Did you see his eyes?

  The way he looked at me

  I’ve seen that look before

  And selfishly I’ve greeted them by staring at the floor

  Cracking a stranger’s reality into one that’s ignored

  Walking on embarrassed and showing no remorse

  All he wanted for a second was a moment out of the self-deprecated and absorbed

  Moments we all live in

  I saw his eyes and the way he looked at me

  This time with no pause for thought or time to breathe

  I looked down deep into those cerulean pools

  Sighing a sympathetic offering of stealth

  I saw the look in his eyes and there looking back was myself.

  mind part 2

  Sat upright in a bed that’s not your own, you syphon through packets of medication. You study each pill, piercing the foil carefully, listening to each pop, placing them delicately in your palm. They build and build until you cannot hold any more without them slipping from between your fingers and so you start to put them in your mouth. Powdery and metallic in taste, you let them fur on your tongue. You clench down your teeth.

  Swallow.

  There is no method here, no meditation, no ideal or thought-out end. You just do. You swallow and swallow and swallow until you feel your eyes pulse distorted black shapes onto the wall in front of you. What are you doing? You’re not sure. In its greatest irony this is the closest to alive you’ve felt in months. The power. The power that you’d thought these very things had taken from you now reclaimed in a moment of adrenaline-filled weakness. Your fingers and toes shake furiously, your heartbeat in your ears, your stomach dropping from higher storeys with each breath. You try so desperately to close your eyes, pushing your back slowly down the middle of the bed but they’re forced open. Stapled. Prized and widening with fear. What have you done? How did you get here? Why?

  No answer sizzles to the surface, just aggressive acid reflux. Vomit. Most of it down your top and stuck in your hair. Nonplussed you are still here. Then, tears. Duvet-gagged screams. Anxious pleading text messages to recipients of such absurdity as you’ve forgotten who you have. If anyone might care. You stay awake for days. Leaving early in the morning you close the front door halfway as to not wake anyone and you slip off to a shopping centre. Zombie-like fingering through clothes that just hours ago you tempted to never wear again, you buy them all. Dresses, make-up, books. Laden with distraction. Eyes still pulsing. Body tested to its final limits. Still working. Still pushing. Still alive. You arrive home silent. Curtains drawn, own bed. Two slices of dry toast. Vomit, again. You wriggle down and shut your eyes. Inner monologue shouting verses of your stupidity, angry and abusive phrases others have given you stuck to your mind’s tongue, spitting it back as though it’s language you have bred. It’s not. Your phone vibrates. Anxiety. You haven’t dared to read the things that you had sent. The panic of others’ worry. The fear of who you may have hurt in hurting yourself. The gross indulgence of asking for help from someone so removed. Expecting someone to care. Your body writhes around in filth and shame. It is not until now that you realise what you’ve done. The weight of it all. The seriousness
. This act of punishment administered so nonchalantly that it evokes terror each time you remember it. Why did it feel so innate? Why was it so easy? If no obvious trigger, who’s to say the same again is not a sleepwalk away.

  You open the message, it reads:

  The reality you experience in your head is secondary and biased.

  You are a beautiful and awakened young woman, you are valuable and bright.

  Hope. Heart-banging hope. Help. Hell driven to it.

  Weightless and alive again, if only for a moment.

  Days that follow are shamed and long, you take up running to exhaust you.

  More messages, same sender. Loud and authoritative, tender and persistent.

  Nobody else knows where your brain has taken you but them. But you are here now, unmasked, accounted for, being pulled forward by a rope of desperate late night slobbering calls that without, you would have autopilot-slumped on the cold porcelain of a public bathroom.

  There is not a night that passes where the words exchanged don’t help you. Ease you. Humanise you. They cradle your battered brain to vow you will do the same for someone else at any cost. In your greatest weakness, they battled for your strength. You are here now, unmasked, accounted for, alive.

  inner gold

  Soften the shards

  That broke you clean

  Fresh and angry

  As though they seem

  Can be rounded as gems

  Handed as souvenirs

  To those who are yet to find light

  In your old rotten fears.

  resilience

  Novelty is such the mind’s addiction

  Cravings for comfort

  In things that breed emptiness

  Feasting on feelings with the unfriendliest

  faces

  But what if we traded to take from different places?

  If we nourished our souls in ways we deserved

  And picked softer tools to tickle our nerves

  Cradled our minds in a sip of a sauce of its own brilliance

  And found novelty in our mind’s own source of resilience.

  dysthymia

  It is uncomfortable blunt language

  No apology screens sincere enough

  For the screams and swearing

  Of what it’s made me do

  It circles on my tongue

  Bitter furs and tangs of acid

  As I repent on how this thing

  That I lost the remote for

  Could ever make you feel

  I didn’t love you

  In the deepest way I could.

  wrong spaces

  Why does the guilt

  Always hit so late?

  Twist and rip

  It breaks me in two

  Still not half enough

  Still too whole

  To dive back into

  Dizzying nausea

  Fills me up more and

  More

  Spurting, bursting

  All encompassed hurting

  Still not half enough

  Still too whole.

  kindness

  All that matters is kindness

  I know it sounds obvious

  But it’s true

  Think of all the bad things in the world

  And then think of you

  Think about all of the troubles you’ve faced

  And then think of all the kind faces

  That pulled you through

  It’s them that reminded

  you of your power

  And on the days you feel you’ve got little purpose

  Remember as humans it’s as basic as showering

  Others with kindness

  Compassion

  Lashings

  Of love

  Regardless of race, sex, location, and material stuff

  It’s kindness in its simplest sense

  That will take us from this dark present

  Into a more hopeful, prospecting tense.

  Your mind is biased

  And your brain is blind

  There’s still a store of strength

  Left in you to find

  she must be fat

  body part 1

  It’s April in London and you’re smiling at your feet. Toes jumping up and down gently, padding against the leather sole of wicker wedges. It’s your first day of your first job and the first time you’ve ever ordered a coffee. ‘Two skinny chai lattes please.’

  A blonde woman, far too pretty to be fair, swings on her heels and reaches for a wooden swizzling stick. She looks like she’s got her shit together, she’s thin and tall and blonde and beautiful

  and thin

  and thin

  and thin.

  She’s so thin.

  You wish you could stand in that frame, all collarbones and angled elbows, but you’re on the wrong side of 5’9” with rounded thighs and a well-cushioned overhang of tummy pressing out from your jeans. You squish it back in, smooth out your ponytail and walk half a block to work.

  Everything is a clinical white, the walls, the backdrops, the shiny Apple Mac mouses, the lights, everything down to the people and their skin and the cyclical noise of clacking shoes.

  You pick up the arm of a steamer and rush it over a crimson satin dress, tickling the long sleeves down its seams and knock on the dressing room door. Nervous.

  ‘Yah, I’m ready.’

  It’s her and it’s you, her and her long-limbed body – naked from the waist up, tiny pert boobs meeting your eyes like pins pricking balloons.

  She places her left hand on your forearm to balance, steps into the dress, and waits for you to zip it at the back.

  When you get home you unzip yourself.

  Knickers snake the legs of jeans that lay atop a faded Marks & Spencer’s bra, the underwire poking to catch the cuffs of your old favourite jumper. You drop your jewellery – weightless coppered rings that have left green replacements, thin golden chains, a hair clip pushing back your sweaty fringe. Off. Just in case. Deep sigh, deeper breath out. You arch your back forwards, you’ve forgotten your socks. Ankles embrace and tango to fling them off in a finale. Hopeful. Palms, cradling your stomach, there is more to give. ‘Have a quick wee.’ Just in case, deep sigh, deeper breath out, hopeful.

  Standing as a body, rosacea and bruises that paint Rorschach marks across the backs of your goose-pimpled thighs, just pure, finite flesh, your toes lift and tip with trepidation from bathroom tile to the familiar cold white skin of the scales. A number flashes and flits, undecided, jumping between aggressive differences, innocent to the wait of the worth and the worth of the weight. Static digits. Staring. There is more to give. There is more to understand. There is more to remembering the woman with the coffees and the girl and her naked body, there is more to you than what you think there should be less of. But still, as weeks turn over months and these moments feel like impressing years, you forget again in these alone minutes and all you know of yourself is a number.

  stuff

  I think the thing that really gets me

  The thing that turns me green

  The thing that makes me really want to scream

  Is if I took away the inches

  The measurements, the weight

  The half-cut-up potatoes

  Left to grow cold on my plate

  The thing that makes me angry

  Makes me want to cry

  Is I’ve always been much smaller

  Than the way I’ve understood size

  I’ve made up sticks of butter

  That I’ve told myself I’m made of

  And I’ve sold myself as bigger

  Arched my arms wider than needed to cradle

  This magnificent piece of magic

  That keeps me all together

  This stuff that I have pulled at

  This stuff that I should’ve treasured

  This stuff that in all these years

  I’ve told myself is huge

>   Has simply been the shape

  Of the holiest refuge

  With every time I look back

  Sometimes only just a year

  I wonder why I waddled with

  This disgusting faulting fear

  There was not that much of me

  There was just enough

  There was cellulite and thighs

  But there was also just this stuff

  This stuff that wasn’t ugly

  This stuff that wasn’t big

  This stuff that was simply just me

  Stretching to a woman from a kid

  This stuff that I don’t remember

  Ever wishing there wasn’t less of

  But as I’m getting older

  I can’t stand it being the death of

  My sense of reality

  I only hope

  I only pray

  I’ll start to see

  If I look properly

  There’ll never be too much of me.

  shoreditch house

  She took one look at me and decided not to change her dress

  Decided that even in her work clothes

  They’d still serve further to impress

  Him

  The depression has started to kick in

  I slipped in

  To this

  I slip into this

  I slip in every time

  She’ll kiss him

  Without changing her dress

  And I’ll kid her I’m still fine.

  kale

  Oh kale leaves

  How you depress me

  I only eat you

  So boys want to

  UNDRESS ME

  kale reprised

  (two years later)

  I’ve been eating a lot of chips

  To fill out the dips in my hips

  That your fingers used to press

  Nothing but a starving urge

  To spill out of the silhouette

  You’d once undress.

  wrigley’s extra

  The comparison’s a killer

  So much so it’s gum for dinner

  Why didn’t god birth me thin

  The god I love lives in this house