Poem 139

Assembling the body parts of depression … in the summer of 79/80 my brain started to race away on me … the killing fields of Cambodia had been revealed, huge pyramids of skulls but the New Zealand government (ie us, our country) chose to recognise the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate rulers of Cambodia and threatened to activate the SEATO treaty and pitch us (again) into war against Vietnam for daring to liberate the most hellish country on Earth … everything was wrong and back to front and I was obsessed, brain and mouth over-revving, gabbling at people, not sleeping properly and then dropping into pits of despair … I looked up my symptoms in a Psych textbook and found that I could be considered pathological …

… the clinical epigraph describes the skeleton over which I drape the soft tissue of my direct experience, a sense of being underwater and losing all will to do anything about it …

… six or seven years later I included this poem in the script for Polythene Pam so I still stood by it as a first-person evocation of ‘black dog’ …

Building The Beast

The subject appears unable to screen out irrelevant stimuli or to distinguish relevant inputs, seemingly insignificant events within their personal environment may trigger neurotic depression or a tendency may be evident to assume personal blame for occurrences over which he/she has no control

Those are the bones

this is the flesh/ I hit the surface
						       & slid under
my feet through a hoop of light

	                                & then 
no effort
           no lift 
           from the blind bottom
					   
to rise
requires effort

                I will try
in a minute

            in a minute
I will remember 
                 where to go


the skin is unimportant

the head can’t be overlooked

the hole is where the heart was