Always a new day
Ever a hope
Dog on a chain now
No time to mope.
Look to the future
Too far to see –
Look to the past
Learn, go, move on, be.
Live in the moment.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Take hold of hope
No place for doubt.
The path isn’t cast;
Life is to live.
Strive for your hearts goals.
You get what you give.
Nov 2011
This morning I forgot to take my pills
which wouldn’t be so bad –
Except that I forgot yesterday as well.
And so today I’m spacey cos I don’t
forget to take them as a rule
And my senses feel estranged – they ebb and swell.
My mind is hard to focus
I need to find some gum
When I chew I can organise my thoughts
I could crunch to concentrate
or just sleep to rejuvenate
And tomorrow take my meds just as I ought.
ps I usually use a Dosette box, but got slack about refilling it this week. Bad move.
This was written at a time when I was feeling exhausted and spent; dangling as though on a string like a marionette.
Some laugh at the world – but what’s to laugh at?
It used to be so easy – but I can’t remember how.
A ghostly chuckle in my ears –
A relaxed, contented smile before my eyes:
My voice. My smile. My ears. My joy.
They seem so distant to me now; plunged in the depths
of self-pity, loneliness, frustration and depression.
The wells of my eyes are barren.
There is no relief for the dryness of my heart
as it cracks and I dangle from a string.
If I refuse the string, I could live a life
of sheer and utter relief;
Relief from the barrage of emotions that storm me
from minute to minute…
hour to hour…
day to day.
In the depths of the gully I would gladly surrender
the thrill of soaring the heights.
At the heights I would wish me more string.
In the middle – I pause and wish for moderation –
But what the cost?
This poem was written during a time when I was exhausted, but not depressed – long before my initial encounter with Depression. I was disenchanted with many things and felt like I was being torn in a lot of different directions by the demands in the household I was living in, my work, my Church and my own emotions. I was in phase of experimenting with free verse as well as some old English language. The reference to beauty and truth draws back to Ode on a Grecian Urn by Keats which I studied for my HSC.
The poem reflects the way I have often felt in more recent times when progressing toward becoming unwell.
Reality bites?
Bites? Nay – it gnaws.
It grinds me away with its powerful jaws.
There is breaking and tearing –
Yet taste, yet flavour.
Mastication, taste, digestion, excretion –
Where is reality?
Where is truth?
Is beauty all truth? Or truth beauty?
Which portion –
Which fragment
of that which is truth…
is reality?
This was written six months after major brain surgery. I now know that this is a major risk factor for depression. At this time I took it that my body was reacting with exhaustion to trauma. Retrospectively, the truth is that what I was probably experiencing was a combination of both. It’s amazing how long a black dog can circle you unnoticed despite impeding your walk and causing you to stumble. One thing that strikes me as a shame is that there was then, perhaps there is now – no active follow-up of people who had major brain surgery to screen for depression. The statistics for it are actually quite high and warrant it – I will have to look them up again to add them in here.
Anyway, this is Vanishing Days
I’d pack up all I have to disappear
I’d run a thousand miles away from here
To abandon this life with all its confusion
To flee reality and resist the illusion –
I long to be free from all complications
From all of those everyday expectations
Where nobody has any knowledge of me
How I long from this everyday life just to flee.
But where would I go?
And how would I know –
That I’d run far enough to be free?
For no matter where I’d begun –
No matter where I might run –
Every place I could go I’d find me.
Here is a poem written freestyle at a time when I was struggling immensely. Again this was in the early days and I had thought myself to be merely exhausted due to the amount of big things that had been happening that year – including the brain surgery that led to my depression.
Straining forward, forward
Pulling hard against the tide of inertia
pulling me back, and back to some place
as I slice through the gelatinous mass
of my existence in which I swim
Never moving anywhere.
Kick.
Stroke.
Kick.
Stroke.
Kick.
Stroke.
Breathe.
Breathing the same air.
Suffocating as the oxygen thins.
Less to breathe.
More of the same.
Kick.
Stroke.
Kick.
Stroke.
Kick.
Stroke.
Breathe the same –
More of less to breathe.
Suffocating and dying of Inertia.
Groundhog days was written in 2000 at a time before I recognised the black dog for who he was, yet at this point I was being towed along more influenced by his direction than my own.
Oh to revel in this breath
and not ignore the pain
To go to sleep and not wake up
to live this day again
To laugh aloud so free – so free
from the belly of my soul
And spill the tears that dwell inside
before they rot, erode and mould;
To wear my face, asleep, awake –
whe’er joyed, mad, jealous, bored –
To smash to shards that cursed jar
that stands there by the door;
To place my feet upon the path
not doomed to circle back
After climbing hill and valley
to the same place, same damn track.
To walk the path with someone else
with feet beside my own.
To find the strength of someone’s gut
to bolster and press on;
To soar the heights on laughter’s wings,
to bathe in salt of tears
To be still in someone’s stillness,
to bring arms for someone’s fears;
To have somehow made some difference
in some small unimportant way
And to be made somewhat different
by the passing of a day.
I live with a black dog. It follows me everywhere. My philosophy now is that I need to plan for its needs when I plan for my own. I also need time out and restful places to enjoy the warmth of the sunshine on my shoulders.
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livingwithablackdog 