Prologue
There is but one thing more mysterious than time future and that is time past. In ‘the now’ we shape both, eternally responsible for both what lies ahead and that which lags. Ever asking to start from scratch. Previous armour only half built for imagined energy and of course the debate on how to phrase the flitting features that make up this thing we happily define as life on earth.
Taking a bite from the more bitter brand of apple should remind us that we have a skull. Teeth tearing into tough green fruit. And yet a skeleton looks more alien to the living than an extra-terrestrial might, if brought about by some breakthrough in astronomy.
Those lifeless eyes of certain passers-by. Lifeless at least to the herd like, pseudo enlightened, who validate one another by way of pattern recognition. Each one of us more in tune with distant stars of a night sky than the humanity deep down within other human beings. Stars long dead. Still, we’d rather lay back in amazement at those faintest of sparkles.
The soul knows no past. The soul knows no future. It listens not to quiet heartbeats nor to the echoes of our unknowingly clumsy footsteps. The skeleton, the star, every ship signal and all birdsong are but markings on a map. The territory is that which isn’t.
*
In these pages, I hope to deliver a life affirming self-portrait of someone who lives with schizophrenia.
I am called to plumb the depths of every experienced horror, hardship and setback, because like with light and darkness, up and down, and forward and back, these negative concepts correspond to a counterpart.
For every horror there have been moments of joy. Out the other end of every hardship, I have become somewhat more resilient and with psychosis presenting me with various forms of hell, I have been able to glimpse many heavens.
These ‘many heavens’ are what some might label ‘psychotic delusions’. Another interpretation could be ‘cosmic consciousness’. Others still could be ‘transcendent thinking’, ‘spiritual awakenings’ or ‘enlightened energy’, all depending on what personal picture of the world one has.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines psychosis as entailing a “loss of contact with reality.” To the outsider, be it a relative who knows the subject well or a psychiatrist prescribing treatment, this definition is functionary. However, for me who lives it, this definition is unsatisfactory.
German Philosopher, Frederic Schopenhauer, speaks of there being a division between the world of phenomena and the noumena. Similarly, Buddhism teaches us, through the term Maya, that the world of perception is an illusion. Therefore, I do not accept that I have ever “lost contact with reality”. After all, who out there can confidently draw the lines as to where any so-called ‘reality’ begins and ends?
So, despite my fear of sounding grandiose or even pompous, I feel called to offer alternatives to those cold, clinical, medically accepted definitions attached to ‘mental illness’. Alternate perspectives, which, in these pages, will be expressed in both poetry and prose.
Ultimately, by way of these writings, I wish to give birth to a first-hand, honest illumination of schizophrenia as I have come to know it and present a perspective that might challenge societal stigmas.
I hope to show that heaven and hell, transcendence and depression, awakening and anxiety, enlightenment, and schizophrenia itself are all but words. Words that are but a keyhole to my experience. It is with my experiences that I hope to reach you, using language merely as a tool.
Episode 1
My social worker was a well-dressed, softly spoken man. He sat across from me and asked some customary questions about my sleep and my diet. He then said to me, out of nowhere: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” These words didn’t mean much to me at that time. As Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan, until you get punched in the face”. I was twenty years of age and had just spent thirty-one days in a psychiatric hospital. I had met psychosis head on. I was embarrassed, weak and tired.
I can only remember two other things the social worker said on that routine visit, the first of which was: “readers are leaders.” He pointed to the shelves upon shelves of books that were in the room in which we sat, that room being, my parent’s living room. Piled on those many shelves were my parents’ books. Those books loomed over us, untidily stacked.
I had spent much of my youth carrying a book either under arm or placed conveniently on the very top of my folders, with other sixth form equipment. I’d often tell people, if ever asked in return, that my favourite book was either ‘Crime and Punishment’ or ‘Les Misérables’. Difficult, lengthy literature, I guess. Though if truth be told, I like so many others, would probably pick ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’, as being, the book which made the biggest impression on me at a young age. And of course, I would resist the silence of sleep with the tones of Stephen Fry reading aloud J.K Rowling’s many ‘Harry Potter’ books, years into my late teens.
The final thing I remember the social worker saying to me that evening was: “If you want to learn about the world around you: read. And if you want to understand yourself: write”. His words came and disappeared as quickly as they were spoken.
*
Out the box, it’s 3am.
Walking by the Vauxhall waterfront again.
Flexible toes jiggling jelly-like
Inside a pair of smelly nikes.
Daydreaming of the Tao: that mixture
Of riddle and illusion.
Hooked on the great thinkers
Of yester-year as a yester-man.
Kafka carnage.
Basquiat chat bazooka bold.
Kerouac clutter, like what we mutter.
H. Miller mute since that final zoot.
*
My first year of study at the University of Liverpool had become, by the end, a hopelessly romantic, jealous blur. Excessive partying, lack of direction and youthful naivety had taken its toll.
I was off the party powders and not drinking for the month of September 2012 and I was ready to start my second year. However, things spiralled out of control very quickly. Prolonged bouts of extreme paranoia were becoming my day-to-day reality.
I’d been with my girlfriend at the time, for around a year. In youthful blindness, I believed that she was “the one”. Unfortunately, this was soon coupled with a fierce delusion. I started to believe with red hot conviction that she was seeing other guys, including my brother and close friends.
I externalised my incoming psychosis by becoming aloof, walking the streets of Liverpool alone, and behaving aggressively towards dear friends. Only a select couple of my friendship group became trusted at this point.
My brother, Anthony, on hearing that I was struggling, came to visit me. Things were unfixable. It was a bitterly cold Liverpool morning when we caught a train to Euston, London.
It must have been a glaring shock to mum and dad on my arriving home, for I was fully manic. A barrel of frenzied energy. Somehow, I calmed down enough to spend a night in my old bedroom. That night, my brother did not leave my side.
Unfortunately, things were only worse the next day. I was driven to A&E. From there, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for the first time in my life, under Section 28 of the Mental Health Act. The location of my new home was Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, South-West London.
From there on in, the reference point for everything I would come to live through in my life, would be mental illness.
*
Humble healers, tumble weeders,
Free-thinking fighters,
Soul survivors and mighty memorisers,
Listen in and buckle up.
Listen up and buckle in.
Siberian souls who foam the tide,
Pick a side.
Your choice today is Tolworth’s seventeen
Or Chekov’s six.
Dennet’s troopers,
Who battle blank, from bacteria,
To Bach and back
Roll your dice and hoodwink hollow hope.
If passion sprouts and softly fades,
Then do without doubt until the next episode.
Decode later, Carter’s papers.
Forever the phantom flirt:
Dusty dirt decorates your stripy shirt.
Another dozen hapless thoughts furniture your mind.
Out you go on yet another night-time search.
Looking now for any left-over power.
Quick, snort it up and raise your glass
To heaven, fast.
*
I was twenty years of age and by a distance, the youngest patient on Queen Mary Hospital’s Laurel ward.
Was I really under scrutiny from other patients to see whether I was fit and proper to become an intelligence agent, gang member, or part of some elite club where only the ‘crazy’ know ‘what’s what’? Had I consumed Morpheus’ red or blue pill? Or was it simply the ‘Old Bill’ tracking my thoughts? Although, not the London Met, more likely Mossad, the CIA and/or MI6 spying on me and dissecting my inner world. All the above, happening in my mind and happening hard and fast.
Merely days into my ward existence, I began to believe my death to be around the corner. This fear was coupled with an even firmer belief that my family had been killed as a result of something I’d done wrong whilst on the ward.
Convinced that this had happened, I remember being back in my ward bedroom, sobbing. I ripped a green t-shirt to threads. Ireland’s green. This ripped T shirt represented my family. I placed the T shirt as neatly as possible on the floor. I took a crucifix from my neck and onto the t shirt it went. I took post cards from my bed side table and put them on my mattress. One post card had been sent to me by my grandmother. It had the image of a cathedral on the front. This prompted me to stop and pray. To what God I prayed to and to which religion I belonged in that instance, I did not know. However, I fell back on the Catholicism of my younger years and began to repent for my many sins.
I thought hard, with hands clasped tightly, of all the words that I could remember that made up the ‘important’ prayers we used to recite at school. My hands rested on my bed and my knees were planted to the floor. This brought my breath back to normal. “Our Father who art in heaven…Hail Mary full of grace…To Labour and to ask for no reward.”
Malcolm X says in his autobiography (a book that has inspired me and delivered me many memorable lessons over the years): ‘If you take one step towards Allah, He will take two steps towards you.’ Being forced to take steps backwards into the darker quarters of my mind has posed the question. When stepping forwards and into better health, to what should I be aiming?
Psychosis is like a poisonous plant. It tends to creep up on me and grows until thoughts like the ones described above explode into whirring action. These hydras are both troublesome memories and since occurring, lurk in the background. I know deep down those intense symptoms of psychosis possess open return tickets to and from my mind. I am therefore perpetually on the lookout.
*
To never blow trumpets on Tunisian sand.
Nor sail past Liberty’s statue.
Remember the smell of wet pinecones in French forests?
That was what the future used to smell like.
Have you ever closed your eyes
In order to watch Van Gogh die
Or begged for Hockney hedonism to survive
In time to ride real and side with crime until
The vibrant thrill of Poseidon’s will
Decides to still the watered quill.
Have you truly inspected the bees and those honeyed hives?
Knowing that no one here gets out before five.
From time to time, you’d walk a Buck black step
In Cambridge autumn without pausing.
You’d appreciate those amber bricks some more
If they at least tried to reflect the eclectic metrics of urban wars.
Rinse FM blurry and blue, not just in logo, turning you loco.
Comedown frequencies all too frequently.
*
Over the course of my first week on Queen Mary’s psychiatric unit, my senses were sharpened, as if by razors. All was ludicrously lucid. I felt I could read people’s motivations and therefore predict their words and their actions. Telekinesis in action. Telepathy rampant.
I regret to say that I often found myself at odds with several members of staff that were working in the hospital. For example, one nurse, aware that I was supposed to have been studying philosophy at university, asked me to tell him “Why would you study philosophy, what’s it all about?” Senses heightened; I suspected a personal dig. I responded, in front of those listening, by saying firmly and loudly: “Philosophy teaches you not what to think but how to think.” A great answer, I arrogantly thought.
I wasn’t sleeping properly when first admitted to hospital. I would patrol the corridors of the ward and perform kung fu postures and poses through the corridors and long into the hospital night, alike to Martin Sheen in the opening sequences of Apocalypse Now, Sheen and I equal in our despair.
My confrontational posturing eventually led me into a spot of bother with the staff. One morning, I was possessed to climb up on to the top of a hut in the hospital smoking area. When I jumped down from the hut, several of the nurses circled me, along with ward security. I was then in the corridor outside my bedroom, having darted past them. I tried to run again as they went to grab me. I was raging and hollering at the top of my lungs but shouting and screaming in resistance did no good. The group of men trying to restrain me had now grown. Around half a dozen of them were now grappling with me in the corridor. I was eventually dragged into my bedroom and pinned down to my bed.
I was on my stomach, wriggling, yelling, panting. My trousers and boxers were pulled down. I was still shouting and struggling. One of the more elderly female nurses was now there waiting above me, as I squirmed and twisted. I had fists made but my arms were locked down. The syringe containing a tranquiliser drug was at the ready. I begged to take the medication orally, but it was too late. The needle went into my bare backside.
The nurses proceeded to leave one by one, as I fought to catch my breath. The sedative kicked in immediately. I got up and waddled into the corridor once more. However, I was dosed up to the point of defeat. After swaying about a bit, I went back to my room with my tail between my legs.
*
Spinoza’s Lord was Einstein’s too.
“God or Nature”, either name will do.
J Star still “spits for catharsis”
Whilst Caleb’s culture and vocal vultures
Sing songs to the Amish.
Forget being listened to for a second.
We just need to be heard.
To see the wingless bird still ever spurred.
Beauty third. Mild murmurs undisturbed and lilac words
Forever deserved.
All along,
High on the fumes of Bruckner bombs,
Gripping the pillows.
Sipping the yellows.
Tripping through puddles.
Clipping the cuddles.
To king on high and to holy scalley
Down a lonely alley,
You can’t come to climb a mountain
Without gaging the valley.
I guess despite my wishes, I’ve hit the heath.
So, slumber super, me and Lex Luther,
With weakened worlds wilting beneath.
Odd numbers again, back to play,
Prime this time: dictating our day
Through flight and fray.
Number three, the holy. The Trinity.
Freely seen divinity
Occurring willingly.
Willow tree, you had me there:
Imagining a loving pair could
Blossom beneath your swaying sheet of hair.
Travelling now between cradle and grave.
They say fortune favours the brave.
So, I guess I ought to seek to savour
What luggage resembles courage.
*
On another random day on Laurel Ward, Queen Mary’s Hospital, I was sat conversing with Adam. Adam, an elderly man, was loud and large in voice and in manner. We smoked. He talked. I listened. I must confess that this conversation is semi-fiction. I only hope that the essence of our interactions is somewhat captured by what I have written below.
ADAM: Did you know that Malcolm X wrote out the entire dictionary whilst in prison, lad?
JIM: No, I didn't. Is that why you sometimes carry one round with you here on the ward?
ADAM: (smiling) Perhaps. Though I am no prisoner. Merely eternity’s hostage.
JIM: ‘Eternity’s hostage’? I like that.
ADAM: Pasternak.
JIM: Pasternak?
ADAM: Pasternak was a Russian poet but never mind him for now. Allow me to read you the definition of the word ‘universe’. There is a lesson to learn from it: ‘All existing matter and space considered as a whole, the cosmos. The universe is believed to be at least ten billion light years in diameter and contains a vast number of galaxies; it has been expanding since its creation in the Big Bang about thirteen billion years ago.’
JIM: So, what’s the lesson you mentioned?
ADAM: I’ll ask you a rhetorical question. Are each of our steps, smiles and sighs, every one of our thoughts, our numbered emotions and the entirety of our dreams, contained somewhere amidst the expansion of those ‘ten billion light years’ and all those ‘galaxies’?
JIM: How should I know?
ADAM: As has been said by many thinkers in varying fields: The world is not so much made-up things but is instead made up of action.
JIM: Yes! That makes sense. I read once that Einstein believed that if religion was to stand up and cope with the demands of modern physics, it must be a cosmic religion.
ADAM: Einstein, eh? You’re not as dumb as you look, lad! Einstein indeed. It was he who said that his God was the God of the philosopher, Spinoza. Spinoza, the greatest of all philosophers, who concluded that God as a concept, God as a term, and God as an action, is necessarily equivalent to Nature!
JIM: Nature? As in, the natural world? Or human nature?
ADAM: Listen to this. Man and Woman alike were made in the image of God. Our greatest resemblance, maybe our only resemblance to Him, is creativity. Our capacity to create new life. Our gift to create art. Creativity in action. Creating what? You bet, creating action.
We mustn’t confuse ourselves with expanding universes and all that scientific balderdash. I must stress to you that ‘Nature’ is the only phrase we need to cover what scientists think they’re covering. Unfortunately, the phrase has been put through the washing machine of daily usage far too many times. Mis-used…
JIM: Simply said. I guess it would be simple to accept, if only life itself was so simple.
ADAM: Don’t be confused, lad. To those who say the universe must have been here first, we must present to them another way of defining ‘universe’. ‘Uni’ after all, means ‘one’ and ‘verse’ can mean ‘word’!
JIM: I suppose the monks out East, who believe all to be ‘one’ have got it right, eh?
ADAM: Yes, perhaps. Your Einstein and his hope for, how did you put it? A ‘cosmic religion’? Those Western hopes may well chime and have been chiming with those Eastern monks and their bells for many, many centuries.
JIM: I remember John’s Gospel starting with the words: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God’. Something like that.
ADAM: Nature. It’s all nature. Why do you think Physics used to be correctly named ‘Natural Philosophy’?!
JIM: That is if we accept your definition of “universe” to mean “one word”, I suppose.
ADAM: It matters not whether we accept it or not. Anyway, don't think on this too much, lad. All is well that ends well and coincidentally- this conversation has, I think, come to an end.
*
Spirit-spun yarns yield a hope
Harder and heavier than Herculean craniums.
Page bound soundscapes breathe ever elastic.
This notepad’s alive in a library of vocab gymnasiums.
So, I guess that makes this biro a gymnastic psychic.
Alive to the Sanskrit and to sublime subtexts,
To semi-auto semantics and to fluorescent phonetics,
To jargon Jedis, wordsmith warriors and syntax samurais.
A script we and they live with alike to
Zhivago couplets and Kanye quatrains,
Burmese belldom and curtained Coltrane.
Soul sap sold on the Merlin menu.
Rat race Rock n’ Roll traded for Rochdale rhythms,
Fizzy fortunes and poorly built prisms.
Burnt flowers have made this town
Smell more sour than sweet.
Capsized stars are causing man-made, map madness.
The dragons guard more treasure than ever.
Lily cells and silly spring spells are
Saving concertos for Ingrid, Esther, Alberto and
The other remaining twenty-two signatures
On the gravestone of Icarus.
Do we see sinners in these mirrors?
Which makes forgiveness resistible.
Or do we seek to see mirrors in the sinners?
Which makes us commendable.
*
The next day on Laurel, after speaking with Adam, I was sat inside the ward, post breakfast.
Ace, Queen, seven, three, nine and King. These six cards were placed out in front of me. I had turned them over slowly. I had an audience of one. The man sat opposite me was smirking gently at the charade I was performing. His name was Mark. His smirk and his gestures appeared to encourage the magic trick I was performing. A magic trick that contained neither a trick nor anything magical.
Mark was a thirty something, well-spoken and well-dressed man. His demeanour contradicted the fact that he was subject to the same predicament I found myself in. Each of us deemed so unwell that we were sectioned, subject to living each day and night in hospital.
The year was 2012. It’s crazy to think how back then, patients, like Mark and me, could sit in our ward bedrooms and smoke cigarettes. I remember several afternoons sat in Mark’s room chewing the fat and puffing away.
The chats we had were alike to that of a seminar. Professor and student. Mark, the professor, was an incredibly intelligent person and was willing to teach what he knew. My psychosis burned for answers to questions of societal frameworks, political power, psychological adventuring, spiritual patterns.
If I would ask him of Buddhism and/or Hinduism, he could respond with knowing remarks regarding the life of Siddhartha, the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching and the benefits of reading the Bhagavad Gita. He trumped my limited knowledge of poetry with memorised lines from Eliot’s Wasteland, Hopkins’ The Windhover and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Any verse he chose to deliver could and would be applied to the drama of the day at hand. What’s more, Mark could take dense philosophical concepts and apply them to mental illness. For example, the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, was according to Mark, applicable to an episode where the epiphanies of mania (the thesis) are displaced with depression (the antithesis) and from there a synthesis of a higher perspective is necessarily born.
I had just turned twenty. I was a fresh faced, ferociously ill, impressionable kid. The chats I had with Mark inspired me to think about the bigger picture of what schizophrenia would come to mean for me, both spiritually and within the framework of the society I had briefly left behind.
Nurses encouraged me to keep away from Mark. I get why now. But what I admired at the time, was how Mark stood up to those nurses who liked to flex their arrogantly held powers when enforcing ward rules. Maybe only those who know how England’s psychiatric wards operate on a day-to-day basis will know where I am coming from. Having spoken to several peers at Recovery College classes in years since, I know I am not alone in harbouring distaste at how some (not all) nurses go about their business. When facing such conflict, Mark was a role-model in patiently and respectfully maintaining dignity.
I was on Laurel Ward for thirty-one days and nights. Mark was there when I arrived, and he was still there on the day I left. He wanted nothing from me, except perhaps company. Mark’s mind was a bottomless well. There is a temptation within me to feel a sense of pity that Mark had to contend with hospital and his demons instead of using his brilliant mind for a greater purpose. However, overriding any form of pity is a deep sense of gratitude that I met Mark where and when I did.
*
Collect your crop and inspect the lot.
Dance a death: Stravinsky-esque.
Seat your sorrow up upon the moons of Planet Doom.
The Super Villain, “who held the mic with an iron hand”
He’s one of us, he’s in this band,
He understands our plan.
Our lightning hits where his thunder lands.
Say “hello” to the ghost man and
“Adieu” to the witchery of modern mysteries.
Fact-led factions vine their wagons weak.
Time to fashion our vehicles too but
With sacred glue and petalled blue.
Leave loose the nettled noose,
Heave a levelled load to test your roof,
Bleed the stone to gain that zest, that on our quest,
Ignites our truth.
Truth on nitro deeper than dialectics.
*
In November of 2012, I was discharged from Queen Mary’s hospital. Despite being free from Section, I was still plagued with psychosis.
I had become aware of meditation classes that were occurring every Tuesday and Thursday at a local temple. I remember really liking the idea of meditation. I had always wanted to ‘know’ more about Eastern philosophy. I was always curious of how and why one would practice a Buddhist way of life: Denial of self, life as suffering, suffering as craving, different realms of existence, Karma, Dharma, Nirvana etc. At that time however, I believe I was merely desperate for things to do. Desperate to exit the traffic ridden streets that were being built in my brain in the name of Schizophrenia.
My first meditation class was indeed a strange experience. It took place at a temple in Wimbledon, London. The class consisted of me, a teacher and one other ‘student’. The Sri Lankan teacher claimed in his introductory monologue that, in addition to our five senses, there was a sixth sense that human beings have access to: Mind. I and the only other participant in the class were shown how to practice ‘walking meditation’ and then, as one might imagine, we crossed our legs and shut our eyes. The teacher talked us through our breathing and gave us simple, straight forward instructions as we began to meditate.
We were first instructed to breathe in and imagine watching our breath, as we breathed out. Focusing on not focusing and on letting go any invasive thoughts. Colours entered my mind, either consciously from the surrounding artworks on the temple walls or perhaps via the new space I was now operating in. As I began to feel more relaxed and more at peace, my breathing became deeper and deeper. The teacher’s words would come and then slowly dissolve. Sitting, sitting, breathing, breathing in, breathing out… My body became calmer. My mind became calmer still- a smile appearing between my thoughts and the outside world.
The meditation continued. As the time passed, visions flickered in and out of my mind’s eye. A blur of myself and someone else on the right-hand side of my vision began to form. Everything in the background was a yellowy mist. It was less a hallucination and more an image that one might conjure via memory. I came to realise that the other figure in the mirage was the person in the room meditating alongside me, whom I had met only minutes earlier. I was picturing myself and my fellow meditator glow and shimmer in a bright calm: Eyes shut tight.
I breathed in and out and in and out again whilst this vision of my fellow meditator intensified both emotionally and pictorially. My companion and I were now pictured embracing and kissing. Either her or my arm overarching the other’s back- I could not tell which. We were unified in a warm, cloudless moment. These visions did not have a sexual nature. They were more akin to friendship, company and had the feeling of being embraced and embracing for want of harmony. Time felt absent. I was unaware of all else but the present hum of my breath and the colourful scene that had been painted before me. The teacher then brought the meditation to an end.
I opened my eyes. The many paintings on those temple walls appeared brighter and bolder than before. The teacher was sat in front of us. I looked ahead and awaited his words of ‘reflection’. We were asked: “How did you find it?” Before I could pipe up, my fellow meditator spoke. I remember looking to my right to hear her response. Something inside me, at that moment, knew that she would say what she came to say in one way or another. She looked ahead, slightly to the floor and gestured with her left hand towards me as she said to our teacher that she had “met my friend” whilst meditating. I was that friend. I cannot remember what I said in response to her or what the teacher then asked of me. The session ended.
I was walking myself out of the temple, behind my fellow meditator, when she turned back to say something to me. I can’t remember her words as she bid me farewell. Whatever she said, it was said with a kind of mysterious urgency, its meaning lost in that rushed bye-bye. She looked me hard in the eye and off we went, in opposing directions, never to cross paths again.
A couple of months prior to this experience, I had undergone brief fantasies, on the hospital ward, of travelling to a more ‘spiritual’ country. I remember being locked in hospital, daydreaming of exiting my current predicament and living a monastic existence in the hills of China, India or Thailand. There were moments when I believed this to be a possibility. I never underwent the move to Asia, except perhaps for that one evening spent meditating; away with the sparrows, amidst the 8 of infinity, locked in union with something, with someone, someplace else.
*
How can we invert the appliable triangle?
Learn from the Bible?
When newer dictions are tidal,
Spinning heads like vinyl, forever growing viral?
These biros best be both our buddies.
When it’s in our grip, we seize the triple M:
Memories, money, miracles.
Distant stars resemble vacant values.
Like the Dekalog director who bows his head,
Blessed up there in happy heaven.
Dressed in bluish white and red.
Dostoyevsky too, who warned us then of the grand inquisitors.
We now vow to only kiss religious lips,
Eclipsing the twist of a tailored wish into fragrant bliss.
We can then reside in Folk’s mansion.
A docile dorm for all reborn.
Where is Elijah?
Elijah, who appears in the final line of the ancient book?
With whom anything is possible.
Rooftops we would walk able.
With prophets lay our table.
Capture our passions.
Pull the trigger on the positions we exist in.
Lift a butterfly vibe.
Ink on analogue.
Composing a carefully creed led catalogue.
Episode 2
It was a bright day in the autumn of 2014. I was in Liverpool. My mother had caught a train from London to see me. She sensed, as mothers do, I suppose, that something was off, way off.
Shamefully paranoid, I remember shouting abuse at mum on her arriving and at a visiting doctor and at my trusted care-coordinator (who had been by my side to hear my woes and set me goals for the previous 8 months). Police were called to the house and with the ambulance ready outside, I was set for another stint in a psychiatric hospital. I was relapsing. Hopes of studying and getting to grips with a fresh degree programme were in tatters.
I was first admitted to a standard ward, in Aigburth, Liverpool. I had arrived at night. The ward was packed with patients- all mean looking fellas. I remember green bandanas hanging from back jean pockets, arguments breaking out in neighbouring rooms and smoking in the outdoor cage, where another patient trod on my toes as he came out- forcing me with a stare to get back inside. Me, this currently cocky cockney- now surrounded by dangerous scousers, was going to have to fight or flee.
The events of day one, on the Aigburth ward, hurled past like a train. I was angry, agitated and believed any conversation that was happening around me to be directed towards me. This is a common feature of the paranoia I experience in an episode. This led me, on day two, to argue and step to fight a couple of the patients I was on the ward with. A terrible, potentially fatal mistake.
No more than two days in play in Aigburth and I was transferred. A decision had been made to move me on to another ward. Into a highly secured van I went, flanked by security. I was either deemed too volatile or I myself was in danger on that ward. The van took me to a PICU. This stands for Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit. The PICU was based in Wavertree, Liverpool. I was heavily searched before being ushered in by security. The doors closed behind me. I didn’t know then that I would be spending the next five weeks in this new facility.
*
Interacting with dark magic
No love needed from the inner city of this heart.
I’ve caught the virus of blindness.
I feel deeper than down that
Most couldn’t cope with this carnage,
I always knew these paragraphs
Would have the last laugh:
Over graveyard spent, late rent camouflage.
So, please lower the boom.
Lower the lighting in the room.
I’m still fighting for my right to resume
Life by high noon.
I never came out of this cocoon to be
Wrapped in ribbons and to use phrases like “good riddance”.
A billion jigsaw pieces make up this fractured thesis.
So long, to the Western stranger.
Crimson memory reflects his villainy.
He whispers to the future: “It’s all cyclical”.
The past in an hourglass. This present chapter is a colourful avenue.
Ink in this paint pot.
Splashing canvasses, slashing mantras.
W once lived with patient Shaman and methodical mystics.
We’d shout to the turrets: “Snap your cameras you digital anarchists”.
A shy type, Zarathustra like,
Cloaked, caramel tongued, descending the mountain peak
To sidestep a hemlock death.
He’s all that’s left of the secret soldiers.
And yet
We try to trap any chat of
An electric Eden and eclectic dreaming.
We are still doing our best to
Protect Pandora’s spark and
Please Penelope effortlessly.
Tomorrow I’ll be back sat in the back,
Trading patience for dusty dimes and rusty rhymes,
Dreaming down the gold mines of old times.
Honest. Careful. Quietly calm
In theosophies of the future.
Deep space in this sonorous cycle
Reflects life’s recital.
Our musical programme
Instigates God’s plan off hand.
The system’s a spiral containing
Contagious arrangements of cadence.
This process demands we keep focus.
Aloft with powerful parlance and flowerful gardens.
Yet poetic parodies still spit back at me.
Flowing close to religious rapture; brain aiming and soul capturing,
Shooting canons as the tongue hums skyward,
And yet, hybrid rhymes can’t appease solemn analyses.
So, let’s try to track truth to remove further fallacy.
*
The PICU housed around seven to ten bedrooms. Its narrow corridors separated a modest living area from a large back yard. Parallel to the living area was a small garden in which one could smoke. Above the back yard was a net separating the ground from the sky. Barbed wire clothed the tops of those walls that penned us in. Us patients were under constant observation. The number of patients didn’t exceed ten. The staff on duty would always outnumber us, two to one.
Early on, a mental health worker printed out the whole of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ for me to read (he knew that I was student of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool.) A nice gesture, but I was never going to get my head around that text in a healthy, disciplined state, let alone whilst undergoing intensive psychiatric treatment for extreme psychosis.
The final statement of the Tractatus does however resonate with much that I learned in hospital. Those final words are: “That of which we cannot speak- we must remain silent.” This statement is applicable, as Wittgenstein intended, to: Aesthetic, Ethical and Religious language, but also mirrors the street code that is relevant to ward life. For that matter, Wittgenstein’s maxim also applies to the banalities and flights of fancy that my mind endured, under prolonged spells of psychosis.
Some patients on the PICU had vacant stares, solitary routines and were nothing but silent. You wouldn’t engage with them and thankfully, they’d leave you be. I did however get to know a couple of the others quite well. The stories they told of their lives were at times, as disturbing as they were fascinating. All the bravado I had come in with was being chipped away at, day by day. I heard tales of CAT A prison, life on the streets, heroin addiction and everything in between.
I was being pumped with lots of medication in those Liverpool ward days- tablets three or four times a day. Then one morning, a fellow patient made of me a vehement request. He as much as begged me to keep the little yellow pill I was taking around midday, under my tongue, so that I could pass it on to him.
I couldn’t tell the staff about this, no way. Nor I felt could I enter-into a world of favours and petty dealings on the ward. It all got too much. A heavy wave of (in this instance) justified paranoia hit me hard. I hit the walls of my bedroom and went on a charge around the ward, trying to escape my mind. Tears of anger welled up in my eyes. I was pacing up and down yet could turn no place. I ended up back in my room, awash with snot, panic and defeat.
Nurse, ward manager, security staff and my trusted mentor came into my bedroom to resolve the issue. I was led from there into a padded room, with a large blue mattress placed in the middle. It was explained that I needed an injection. They explained to me slowly, clearly and calmly that it was for the best and I would feel better for it and calmer once I let it happen. These words came from my mentor and a security staff member that I also trusted. I lay stomach first on the mattress and in went the jab. I was then escorted back to my room and to sleep off the day’s events.
On waking, it would be back to the grind of getting through another 24 hours on the PICU, knowing I must resist further requests from my fellow patients and remain silent to all staff about what had got me in such a state.
*
Let’s shoot movies in our memory:
Hazy renditions of a Scorsese vision.
2023: A Lyrical Odyssey.
Kubrickian mimicking &
Parisian Texans declaring Buena vista
Up until the death of Wim Wenders.
Big pictures.
Within which we live fictious.
Up until Bunuel’s mirrors
Send ripples and shivers into our spirit.
Born to the next dawn and
A selection of lyrics, of which this universe
Deserves and our redemption pivots.
We breathe hunger to the beat tapes.
Thanking the Lord, as this mind steps
Towards a conscious cause.
Cosmic laws, and a blissful breeze from the East,
Helps us pause and seek a silent
Release from the violent beast.
We’ve fought psychological wars
On hospital wards to merely learn that
Human nature exists beyond the doors of prescription.
Temple bells and temporary
Thrills extend these quills
In a straight swap of token telepathy
For ghost town therapy.
*
As the days rolled on in Liverpool, on the PICU, I’d kick footballs around out in the backyard, with my retro Chelsea shirt on my back. I wore it, stupidly I guess, for some sacred status maybe or for memory of home (London) and/or perhaps as a way of feeling close to my family. Liverpool is a football obsessed city. You are either a Red or a Blue. And when they say ‘Blue’ they don’t mean Chelsea blue. If a Blue, it is for Everton or nothing as far as they are concerned. Or so I thought…
One member of staff became very important to me, in the psychiatric intensive care unit. This staff member was tasked with shadowing me on a one2one basis for the opening week or so of me being there. He became something of a mentor to me, so a mentor is what I’ll call him.
My mentor was short in stature, but one could tell he’d handle you and three others with ease. With his shaved head, chiselled jaw and hundred-yard stare, my mentor evoked a Martial Arts aura. He must have been around the fifty-mark- age wise. Liverpool born, and Liverpool bred. He spoke quietly, always keeping a watchful eye. He’d stand with me whilst I washed my sheets having wet the bed. He did not as much as smirk at that then ward habit of mine. This man would hug me when I broke down in tears and coach me into coping. He treated me with respect, and I in turn, admired and respected him.
In the backyard of that ward was a wall with chalked targets of 50, 30, 20 and 10 circled on to it. My mentor was a big football fan. He began to join in with me, as I practiced my kick ups and aimed at the wall. I’d hit 20 so my mentor would say hit 30. I’d hit 30 and he’d demand a 50. This was a fun routine and in between me shooting, I’d receive tips on how to adjust to the ward. I’d listen to my mentor talk about how he had overcome difficult times in his own life. We’d finish with a: “Well done lad”, in my direction.
Along with my mentor, many of the other nurses and workers on the PICU would call me “J”. A name I had never adopted or been called before. At other times, it was “Our J”. I’d be called “lad” more times in those four weeks than I had ever been called before in my life and of course many times “Laa”.
In years following, my heart would swell at the memories of compassion displayed by my Liverpool community that helped me through those dark times. Those nurses and their approach are not in the books one reads to become an expert in therapy, mental health nursing or acute treatment. For this reason, the city of Liverpool and its people, both Red and Blue, will always hold a special place in my heart.
*
Was it all for the peacock plumage?
Old coffee and bold postures?
Ice baths and nice tasks?
Let us settle sorrows for now and forever.
Who lies boss of all this dross?
Pinto Pedro, parrot prince? Or Micky Angel?
For whom: the women come and go…
Why is September such a walk over?
What if we had both died off that last gram?
They say a new broom sweeps clean.
So, if your wretched broom runs to this red room,
Remember that D stands for Doom,
But E for any ecstasy resumed.
Interlude
I have lived through three episodes of psychosis. They did not start out as negative experiences. On the contrary, they began in euphoria, ecstasy, excitement and elevated thoughts of grandeur. Below is a brief summary of where my mind was at, at the birth of each breakdown.
October 2012
Strawberry Fields:
I was starting to roam the streets of Liverpool on my own, more and more. I walked up and down Smithdown road and interacted with strangers. I talked to the homeless, giving them any loose change that I was carrying and spared them more time than ever before. I felt comfortable and confident chatting to the people that I met on the streets. I was one of them- ‘it’s society that separates us! Etc’. These cliched sayings were perceived as very important truths.
A myriad of things was happening. I saw then, the possibilities that were there, should we wish to change the world. I wanted to contact previous teachers and friend musicians to put on a festival of education in Liverpool, where I was studying. I daydreamed of returning to India, where I had travelled to the previous year. I felt the urge to ‘do something important’, with the inspiration that consumed me.
I remember taking a trip to Manchester to see Anthony, my brother. I sat in his University Halls room, enlightened and energised. I insisted he listen to me read Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem: The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo. He listened as I read the poem to him, line by line. Now looking back, it was probably a look of fear in his face, not one of awe, which at the time, I saw it for. I remember telling him that “the patterns” were important. I had begun to fixate on the number three. It was extremely significant. A secret. A myth. A fantasy and a reality, all at once. Both seen and unseen. Holy. Divine. Three equalled One. It was now up to me to find others who believed this too.
September 2014
Marmalade Skies:
I overcame my fear of snakes by meditating on images of them weave and slither into and out of my mind’s eye. I was on the rug in my room, leant forward. In between the serpents, there began to appear a hippo. This image became stronger and stronger. I prayed my prayers, feeling a transcendent power. There was a calmness in the air, and I was tapping into it. No more fear.
I was walking the streets of Liverpool, all over again. I spoke then to a Sri Lankan busker. He warned me of danger, if my visions were true. He’d listened to me, but I couldn’t listen to him, not then. I charged on.
Day after day, I walked from Liverpool’s docks to the university campus and then back down Bold Street, up Hope Street and back round the city centre, happy in my head and strong in my heart. I listened to Bob Dylan in my headphones, as if for the first time. Each line he sung, glorious.
Liverpool’s two cathedrals are situated a street away from one another. I remember sitting on the steps of the Catholic one and remembered to pray some more to the cosmic lords who directed me then, from place to place. I would close my eyes and be treated to colourful visions. I did this often when I was out in the open, an odd sight to passing tourists and frowning locals, no doubt. However, I was aware of a higher mission. This kept me strolling and filled me with a drive to search both further and deeper for more answers to life’s many mysteries. What happened ‘now’ was the key.
April 2022
London Falling:
I decided to walk from Sloane Square all the way to Putney. Carried by the confidence that I had lost weight and was now not drinking for six weeks. I was on the up and believed that good times were ahead of me…
I spent the following Saturday afternoon walking from Embankment to Tate Modern and then on to Southwark cathedral. Feeling empowered by the quest to be out in the open and enjoy my newly found motivation. Again, I’d talk to passers-by, letting them feel my ‘energy’ and listen to my ‘eulogies’. I was free from my prescribed medication for months now and boy, did I feel fantastic as a result. In fact, episodes two and three were both caused, in part, by me deciding to quit medication, without medical guidance. My adjustment to life without anti-psychotics, having been on them for years, was exhilarating. I was now awake. I was seeing things in colour for the first time in half a decade. I was now no longer walking under the clouds. I was, dare I say it, ‘happy’.
I saw some friends on a random Wednesday evening. We laughed and joked together over a curry. All was ‘normal’. The following day, I walked to Cannizzaro Park, Wimbledon, at 7am. I filmed birds as they flew up and across the pond. I was fully alive with the feeling that I was at one with nature. That Thursday night, I found myself in the Accident & Emergency department of St. George’s Hospital.
My enthusiasm had been replaced with anger, my optimism with angst and my energy with exhaustion. Just like in 2012 and 2014, the hyper form of ‘happiness’ I had been experiencing, was now shut down by the reality that: ‘what goes up, must come down’.
Episode 3
The year was 2022. I was now twenty-nine years of age and after seven years of life free from hospital, I was back to be being Sectioned. This time, in Tolworth Hospital, West London. Hello again, psychosis, his foe like friend, flooding him full, only to drain him dry. Exhausting any will to be sane.
*
Deep within all my psychotic episodes, my mind would play the strangest and most tiring of games. For weeks on end, I would have to count in my head to ‘significant’ numbers; matching the count to the number of syllables heard in a sentence. If a conversation happened in ear shot it happened also in my head. I took every “I” to mean “him over there”- interpreting every spoken word in earshot as being directed towards me. Even distant, casual chuckles, I’d think were omitted at my expense. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, minute by minute, I lived that reality of ‘non-reality’ for three to four months, in the years 2012, 2014 and 2022.
Most people want to help you and hear you out, with good intent. But they can’t. For what you hear from them are interpreted as insults, snide remarks and calculated personality assassinations.
In the hospitals I have lived in, I have ended up alienating indifferent members of NHS staff because I went against them, in a paranoid and threatened state. Furthermore, I have no doubt frustrated many nurses who have compassionately tried to help my cause. I guess most come to hate the idea of helping you out, good person or not, because in your manic state, you trust nobody, and you are therefore ‘hard work’.
It was clear to me, even at times of blurred sanity, that some of the staff clearly think you’ve maxed out on too many acid trips or have snapped a crack pipe in over usage. This wasn’t the case. Like many of my brothers and sisters sharing the hospital ward corridors with me, I had simply come off my prescribed medication and was therefore at the mercy of chemical fireworks occurring in the brain.
I remember sitting in the garden of Lilacs ward, Tolworth hospital, one afternoon. My mind was going in several directions all at once: Transcendent concepts and numinous thought patterns passed through my consciousness. I sat on an outside bench as this happened. Vividly, I remember flashes of colour blotting my vision when half closing my eyes and at the end of the grass before me, crouched a lion, morphing in and out of sight. Other unidentifiable jungle like creatures shifted and moved against the brickwork to my left: half shadow, half being. The circles that appeared on the fencing to my right created a ripple effect. Ripple effects were common instigators of expansive thinking, when in hospital. Along with visions of animals, they formed a large quantity of the hallucinatory symptoms I’d experience. It is very difficult to put into words how potently signs, images and visions affected me. My interpretations of them would often go beyond the religious or the mythological. They became cosmic.
As you may imagine, these experiences could be enlightening. However, as Friedrich Nietzsche rightly observed: ‘If you gaze for too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.’ Enlightenment could turn to horror in an instant. Communicating this to staff was near on impossible. The added problem of being locked in hospital whilst all this occurred exacerbated certain scenarios. As a result, I could and would act brashly.
When I was on a ward in Liverpool, in 2014, there was a member of staff who, despite witnessing me become hostile and reactive, did not give up on me. Similarly, in Tolworth hospital, an ex-navy, security guard/ nurse looked on day by day, as I underwent the issues I have just described. This man moved slowly through the hospital; his glasses so often perched on top of his bald head. He projected calmness.
After a fortnight of me climbing the walls in Tolworth, I was finally granted permission to be escorted for cigarette breaks. This nurse would accompany me. We shared silence on these fifteen-minute cigarette trips to begin with. After a few days, he told me a bit about himself; his life growing up in South America, his passion for poetry and parts of the world he wished to one day see. I, in return, opened to him, as the days passed. We shared praise for Jim Morrison. He encouraged me to re-listen to An American Prayer, once I had left hospital. I asked him what he liked to write about most. He didn’t go into any unnecessary detail: He responded with: “My travels, lost buddies…”
This nurse was most memorable, however, for his politeness and self-dignity. They used to say “manners maketh the man.” Manners, elegance and a non-judgemental approach certainly made this person a fantastic Mental Health nurse. In hospital, us sectioned folk, are stripped of many freedoms. Our social status has hit a low. Therefore, I am forever indebted to those who treated me with respect, patience and compassion (even when I didn’t deserve it). Nurses, such as the one I have tried to pay tribute to here, have been formative in helping me cope with the day-to-day of ward life and be discharged ahead of time. I told this nurse on the morning I left Tolworth hospital: “You were there when I was breaking down.” He replied: “That’s what we’re here for.”
*
A mixture of sepia scriptures and
Droplets of heavenly elixirs
Persist in us.
So, capture the conscious.
Fashioning ways to
Slay pavement monsters
Is a shortcut to freedom.
Not worth believing.
The digital abattoir,
The very kingdom you now sing from,
Will bring a church and an anthem.
Down to the detail of an ancient inner sanctum.
Poetic engines at times reveal cruel fuel.
No matter how jazz gentle,
A dark intellect forever I will live with.
*
I asked him for a coffee cup. I asked for it “now”. I asked again. He didn’t oblige. All I wanted was a drink. Surely, it was his job to fetch it for me. He’s not doing his job, that bastard. He doesn’t care about us. He is here only for the pay cheque. He walks up and down these corridors like a big shot. Harley Davidson vest on his back, bangles on his wrist, and a chain round his neck. Who on earth does he think he is?
I first met Prince quite some time into my stay on Lilacs Ward, Tolworth Hospital. He was a tall, handsome, Trinidadian nurse with very little to say to us patients. Prince went about his duties methodically and briskly. He seemed to take an instant disliking towards me and me to him.
One afternoon, I found myself sat at a table with Prince and three other ward nurses. Despite being sat at a table that was round, I very much felt in opposition to the four people I had for company. Prince had become uncharacteristically talkative. The conversation went deep. Talk of Religion. They all sat laughing. I felt left out. Prince sat looking at me with accusative eyes. He ate his crackers, relaxed. Me, annoyed, saying something like: But I have read Beyond Good and Evil and Ecce Homo. I’ve done the reading beyond ‘God being dead’. Prince laughed this off. Had I missed something?
Some days later, I had another run in with Prince. I was pissed off and accused him of not being a good person. I raised my voice and intensified my glare. I told him what I really thought of him. I pushed my point, expecting to win this time. But Prince didn’t back down. He let me finish and said to me, bluntly, without a flinch: “My wife died of cancer, okay. That’s why I do this job. You don’t want my help, that’s fine.” This shut me up. I was stunned into silence.
Weeks later, I was roaming the grounds of Tolworth hospital. I had thirty minutes breaktime to be out in the open.
The sun was descending softly in the distance, sympathetically shedding some final rays of warmth towards the evening at hand. I walked without destination, making my way from garden to garden. I stopped outside the entrances of other wards. I wondered briefly about who and what lay behind those doors.
The summer air was enveloping my calmness. I walked, looking forward to my release from hospital, whereupon I could walk the streets without a curfew. The niggling presence of my psychosis had temporarily quietened. I headed back towards Lilacs Ward. Today had been a good day, I thought, as I strolled.
Then, ahead of me in the distance I could see somebody sitting alone at a picnic bench. I paused in my tracks to make out who it was. It was Prince. I hadn’t seen him on the ward for a while. I assumed that he was here for work and on being early, had decided to take in the evening air, as I had just done. I remembered the times I would go to work myself and imagine things about the day ahead that would make me feel anxious or not look forward to the working day. I realised in that moment that I may have become a figure of dread for many nurses on their way to work. Maybe not for Prince, but he prompted me to think of all the others. How, me being disruptive or angry may have affected those nurses into not wanting to work ‘with’ me but instead keep their distance. Within my illness existed a denial of empathy. But I was able to access it at that moment.
Before I checked back into the ward, I called out Prince’s name. He looked up and I waved, wishing him well. I cannot recall exactly what I said to him, but I do remember his response: “Respect, brother.”
I am grateful for having seen Prince that day, for it was our final interaction. If I do see him again, I will hold out my hand and thank him for keeping me in check. Whilst making fun of my lofty opinions and turning down my coffee cup requests, he was reminding me that the world owes us nothing.
*
As usual, I’m in my own musical cubicle.
I navigate my way through the jungle,
To merely tumble in terror tight tonight.
To the tiger, I’m nothing but a restless rhymer.
Forgive me if I mumble in elephant logic-
Poetry of Istanbul and lyrics of London.
Verses we spit to the parchment.
Verses etched in varnish and cooked with parsnips.
Through doors of encoded cultures,
My raps remain reptilian,
Alike to the Lizard King’s.
Reflecting hazards in the depths of chambers Jungian.
So, remain aimless and blame strangers?
Or tame the insane to the tune of a famed cadence.
Let your souls sleep on the beach,
With the water in reach.
Seek other people only with
Verbal measurements equal.
In all movements, try to swerve evil.
First up, you must recognise your capacity to turn up.
Next, focus on your interactions and with whom you interact.
Remember: If lifted by a Deity,
You’re always pulled back to the turf by gravity.
*
On the night G arrived on that Tolworth ward, I was sat with and chatting to two other patients. The time was late. It must have been between midnight and three. Nurses watched on from the other side of the long, tunnel like living area. An auntie like figure, who we will name ‘M’, and a big boss of a man, a real polar bear, giant of a guy, ‘R’, were the two other patients that were sat with me.
R had insights on anything you’d throw his way- politics, psychology, bullshit! Occasionally, he’d hold out a finger and ask me to pull it- he’d fart, and I’d laugh, stupidly. Coincidentally, his favourite word was, “shit”. He’d see the ward life and the world beyond for what it was and criticised things loudly and boldly. M, in her Chinese wisdom, had reflections on the power of solitude and faith. Both her stoicism, and R’s common-sense analysis were fascinating sources of conversation.
That night, M asked me to read a poem from one of my poetry books that was lying on the table. I read aloud, the one titled: ‘The Affliction of Margaret’.
Meanwhile, G was floating nearby, Ophelia like. There was a hopeless elegance about her. She had my full attention. G was clearly ‘mad’ like me, in the sense that she performed bizarre, ostentatious gestures to those watching. I suspected that she was doing this, as I often did, to try and confuse those tasked with analysing my every move.
Eventually G nestled in a nearby beanbag. This was my cue to rock over and introduce myself. She plucked a book from a shelf to her left and placed it on my lap. The title of the book was: ‘A Suitable Boy’. She seemed to find this hilarious. I threw some words her way, in return. She laughed some more and began to speak back. Our body language was alive and vibrant. Smatterings of telepathy dictated all movement.
G and I spoke over breakfast the next day. She had calmed and cooled overnight. She now projected confidence. We ate outside in the garden. The air around us was light and fresh.
In the afternoon, G built a picnic area for us. I knew somehow that she wished for me to join her in the garden. This picnic area had become a secluded den. It was in the corner, away from the other patients and staff. It was all for us. G had arranged the blankets and snacks beautifully, I thought. We were in more than a garden- a green haven, a biblical sanctuary, a nirvana. And like Eve or an Islamic equivalent she offered me her jammy dodgers, grapes and orange juice generously. Trivial in meaning to the outsider perhaps but in those wards, beauty and harmony are a rare thing. G’s affection piercing my heart- not as much then as now in the memory.
Hours passed as us two strangers engaged one another with conversation about our families, our faith and our wishes for the future. I learned from her how much she valued Islam and could sense she had a strong family unit. Weirdly, for those brief hours, I felt sane and was treated as such. Beneath the sunshine and contained in that part of that garden, was something pure that calmed me down. It must be put into context that I had flown off the handle repeatedly before she had arrived. I saw myself as public enemy number one to many (staff mainly) on that Tolworth ward. G had brought me peace.
Right before she was either discharged or sent away to another hospital, she attempted to hug me in our garden. From inside the hospital, staff barked orders of: “No, Not allowed, not allowed.” We both laughed this off.
Right before G departed, and probably wanting to show off to her one last time, I threw my blue and green Nike trainers on to the roof of a building opposite the garden, clearing the green metal fence. G showed me she was “on my team”, when she preceded to chuck her black nikes over the fence as well, with one trainer hitting the roof top to join my pair. The other fell on the grassy floor in between the building and the fence. She then left the ward, and I was back to the grind without my companion. Though that was not the last I’d hear from her.
Weeks later, my brother Anthony visited me on the ward. Anthony and I were permitted to leave the grounds for a few hours. We went to a nearby park and kicked a size one football around. We had a picnic of our own.
On returning, I was back at the reception desk of the ward. I was stood waiting to be scanned for contraband, when a staff member informed me that “a young lady” had visited me. I had missed whoever it was, but they had left for me a present. I was handed a TK MAXX carrier bag. Inside, was a pair of Nike sliders- brand new. Also In the bag was a small plant. I smiled to myself on putting two and two together. G had not only come all the way back, once discharged, to pay me a visit but had also humorously gifted me some footwear- a nod to our trainer throwing defiance.
When I got back to my room, I put the plant on my windowsill and allowed myself a brief smile.
*
To capture and master a chorus beyond borders,
The kingdom of poetry must remain our headquarters.
If you tread heavy, watch any footsteps
That print a sequence of reasons
To cleanse any sins.
Now or never: To move on and speak
To any fellow strugglers and
To any mellow pillow cuddlers,
Who whistle in the small hours,
Recalling powers that made this world ours.
The meek may still inherit any left-over credit,
Scooping crumbs of cold catharsis from off the floor.
Unless you wish to remain blind to
Plentiful portions of earthly truths,
Accept that out of those clubs
Came only diamonds, with hearts as sharp as silent spades.
So, having hit the hill, let’s let spill
Both honey and oil over all we mend.
Let those liquids blend until the bittersweet end.
*
Roxy spoke to the doctors, nurses and hoodlums of the ward in the same tone. She commanded respect and gained it from all before her. For my final month of being sectioned at Tolworth hospital, Roxy and I would spend much of our mornings and evenings together.
The mornings were spent listening to our favourite tunes of that time, with the June sun shining. My AM selection was always Erykah Badu’s glorious, hopeful track, titled: ‘Tempted’. Roxy would insist on playing ‘Birds are Chirping’ by D-Block Europe. I hated that track to begin with but grew to become fonder of it as I grew to become more attached to Roxy. It is worth noting that for those eight weeks, I went without a phone completely. I’d rely on Roxy for my fix of music. She was the one with Spotify and the speaker.
The evenings were spent vaping away in the communal area, literally locked in for the night. I had no bank card or cash on me and no direct way of communicating, let alone purchasing anything from outside. Roxy would sort me out. The miserable, yet wonderfully simple reality being that the highlight of our nights in were when those stuffed crust pizzas would arrive for us to eat together.
Amidst the good times, however, there always lurked beneath the surface, Roxy’s demons. It seemed that her mania was peaking, whilst mine was beginning to calm. She’d lose her cool and break down from time to time. A painful watch. Nevertheless, she’d always return to neutral, as we all eventually had to, no matter how mad we got at being couped up.
A nurse in Liverpool once told me, whilst I was sectioned up there in my early twenties, that one of the signs you’re getting better and nearing discharge, is when other patients start to seem in a worse place than you. It’s a brutal yet starkly apparent truth. My opening two or three weeks in Tolworth were manic, paranoid and rageful beyond belief. I did not meet Roxy until my final month, so was able to quietly sit with her and take on the role of observer, rather than feel the need to compete with any surrounding levels of psychotic driven behaviour. It was Roxy’s turn to fight the system. Mine had come to pass.
On the morning of my discharge, Roxy was nowhere to be seen. This was probably for the best. I have not heard from or seen her since. To think, those who you live with on the psych. wards are your world for a brief period, then you never come across them again. Either way, I will forever treasure memories of Roxy’s company. The tunes of Erykah Badu remind me of her, to this day.
*
Art Deco? Or the digital echo,
Alive in Chrome Yellow?
Living down to the Dynamite,
Through Divinity.
Living in a second lifetime,
Butterflies within my belly.
Instruments many.
I solved the puzzle.
Popped the bubble.
Found my way through the rubble.
Now living larger than any bullet-proofed karma.
Clothed in vapoured armour.
Ignited by 16 candles.
Or was it 17 syllables?
Was it all just another scripture that I visualised?
So, synthesise what’s ours but
Do not sympathise with my scars.
Tie this to the stars of comic action,
As they symbolise comets in galactic traffic.
Solace in my socket as I rocket to a redder passion,
Knowing if it didn’t happen,
My soul still lies bare to the watchmen.
*
Noah walked the Tolworth corridors for the mere week he was on the ward, trying to nurture others, to bring truth to their minds. He had written down many intricate, colourful diagrams of which he’d show us other patients. They represented our lives and our relationships to one another.
One evening, Noah showed me and my pal Roxy an intricate drawing of where and why all our lives converged. I looked at Roxy for proof that the diagram representing our “love for one another” was false and silly. Roxy didn’t deliver me the response I hoped for.
Noah’s “psychosis” was grounded in the spirit of the messenger. He was something of a self-professed torch bearer, in possession of a greater knowledge. As the days passed, Noah’s powerful way of delivering wisdoms and words of advice came to make a profound effect on Roxy.
It was a hot June afternoon when Roxy suddenly became extremely upset and angry with me. She wanted me to see things the way Noah did. Her tears sent me away to my ward bedroom. As I walked away, Roxy shouted at me that Noah had come to bring us closer together and that I was throwing it all back in her face. I sat on the floor of my room as Roxy continued to scream through the grill in the window. She hurled a book in my direction. Later when I was out in the garden, I picked up that book to find many of Noah’s drawings and notes inside. I remember thinking Noah a nuisance for causing all this disruption. I was wrong to think so.
Noah sent a ripple of chaos through those corridors. Yet that chaos challenged the monotony and stifling order of ward life. His monologues were often delivered both in English and French, creating an impression of mystery. He wore unconventional clothing. He thought nothing of going about his day dressed in nothing but bathroom towels.
Noah was a purely eccentric soul. One morning, he walked nobly with an elderly patient from breakfast all the way back to the gentleman’s room, having helped the disabled man eat his meal. He was indiscriminate in who he tried to help and utterly fearless in the face of the norm. I hope that wherever Noah is now, that he is alive and well and that he continues to create those diagrams with the aim of bringing people closer together.
*
You’re all aware I’ve missed life’s trick.
So have hung my hat on blackened crick.
Spat the sting from cauldron thick
And stacked a hell between these lips.
Share this sham or dare the words to stop.
You can.
Another eon, beyond boredom,
Along life’s stairs.
That will come to where you
Live and breathe, yeh, right there.
His words not mine.
Blame the pen again.
Or this muddy mouth
For guzzling irksome ink,
Because when I think,
It’s the fountained drink that sinks towards parchment.
Pardon.
People used to play in sunlit hay.
You were there too, you shan’t deny.
Hold on tight.
Open your heart.
Sail away into indigo skies,
Softly.
Catch a butterfly or two.
Hope for fortune here not there.
Imagine purple patterns,
Zebra features,
Octagon olives,
Pelican play,
Helicopter winters,
All rippling real.
Rope within,
To pull us back,
Has been easily axed.
Neptune puddles.
Imprinted trouble.
Again, again and again.
Dance the day away.
Scribble with
Emerald crayons.
Persist in risk.
Reload your hope with
Baptising John, watching on.
*
I left my ward bedroom, requesting that Jesus walk with me. I paused to blink as I stepped into the dimly lit corridor. As the lock clicked behind me, another door slammed in the distance. Was this another example of silly psychosis and its patterned soundboard? Or was it the clockwork of the universe, awake to our movements, in tune with our primitive confusion?
I arrived in the ward living area. To my right, slumped on the dry wipe sofa, was poor Makeba. She had dribbled herself into a feeble imitation of sleep. The vape I had yesterday borrowed her was held firmly in her right hand. Her left made a fist, with which she propped up her chin. Makeba’s eyes flickered as I walked past her. I avoided any eye contact. Best not disturb her rest. Never had I seen a person more in need of help and yet so beyond any capacity to receive it.
Spencer and Jack were sat at a table eating a Chinese takeaway. They offered me a share of their noodles. I declined and headed for the dusk of the ward garden.
Sophie, the gypsy elder, surveyed the ward from a chair by the garden entrance. She nodded in my direction, as if permitting me my evening stroll. Jodie, the nicest of nurses, watched on. She didn’t normally work nights. So nice to see her here. My smile met her sympathetic gaze, awakening the remaining butterflies in my belly.
Dylan was in the garden with his speaker. John, the Korean of few words, was also in the garden. He never walked on the grass. Instead, he stuck to the concrete paths. Occasionally, he’d stop and bow his head, angling his hands to the sky in a prayer pose. Tomorrow, John and I would be the first to request a cigarette break, post breakfast. Amber leaf for me. Marlboro Reds for him.
Fifty days in. Water everywhere but not a drop to drink, I think. Patients had come to this place and patients had come to go. I truly had become more a summation of this environment than I was a victim of any mental illness. With dozens of lost souls, swimming in a shark bowl.
*
Simple sorrow
Severed swiftly by sword and flame.
Injecting ills.
Inking quills.
Opting in.
None nowhere no more.
Acca town.
National frowns.
Excuse or squeeze the cheese for one more round of these;
Insistent imageries,
Tornedo trade-offs,
pistol improvs.
Remember when you thought yourself
Young in spine?
Writing rhymes akin to ancient signs?
Knowing now, you only ever chimed in time
With pantomime bells.
With what do you respond when He asks:
“Once more?”
*
K had seemed like a decent guy in passing. We were now sat down together in the garden to chat properly for the first time. I told him I was nearing discharge from hospital. If all went well, come the 22nd of June 2022, I would be out. Unfortunately, along with his diagnosis, K told me he had housing issues that were keeping him on the ward for longer than necessary.
K then said to me: “Sometimes James, we listen to respond and not to understand.” He had a habit of staring into the distance when he spoke, with his left cheek leaning snuggly into his shoulder. I could tell K was a deep thinker, like me.
To compete with the likes of K, in conversation, I could have referenced a bunch of philosophers at will, to sound smart. I could mention their overriding theories if need be. I could jump from Platonic Forms, Analogies of Sun and Cave and the ‘Thrown-ness’ of Heidegger to define our condition. In the past, I had buried my nose in biographies of Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. I have routinely tried to get to grips with the likes of Nietzsche, Kant and Sartre. However, all this ‘learning’ wasn't going to wash with the worldly perspective that K possessed. So many of my peers on the psych. wards have seen so far through the looking glass that speaking up about the “nature of reality” is futile.
K continued to speak in a tone of truth. There was no time for any of my ‘philosophical’ bullshit with him. K said to me that evening: “Imagine one’s life from the point of 1992 (the year of my birth) until the current day. Then imagine from 1992 to 29 years previous. Which seems like the lengthier period?” K awaited my answer. I paused, not getting my head completely around what he had just said so asked him to repeat. He did so and I listened carefully. When he had finished, I did my best not to respond but to (truly) comprehend his message.
The above thought experiment really does put “bad times” in perspective. K had used that example to show me how insignificant my troubles were in the grand scheme of things. His message chimes with something once written by Indian Guru, Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.” More philosophical bullshit? Perhaps. What I do know is, credit for some of the wisest reflections on life have come my way, whilst engaged in conversation on England’s psychiatric wards, with the likes of K.
*
The pupils in our eyes
were once students of bright skies.
The drums in these ears used to play percussion
To the melody of a prisoner’s passion.
A listener’s look once boasted
Deep purples and lime greens.
Yet his tale was told too fast for an impatient Pisces and
All other pseudo pleasantries.
Now, with the arrival beside me of Aphrodite,
Her potions playing poetry as remedy to my
Battles with both past and future.
Since colliding with vocal Vikings and
Kaleidoscyping a culture through micro rhyming,
We learnt to abide in a world once worth hiding
From history’s attempt at siding with
Those planets elsewhere, with galaxies
Neither here nor there.
Chosen were the many mediocre moons
Over all our wars, wishes, winters and wounds.
But with sunset silence: safely tuned.
The meek are made mighty.
The fool favoured fair.
Those heads that bowed before aware
Now stand up and dare to sing.
The crown they wear, they share.
The quiet case of all who hoped,
Made firmer now than any vow.
*
Whistling one’s own tune is only permitted via medicines and cubic hesitance. It’s like breathing in cigar smoke from some neo-Castro clutter camp. Chicken clucks on sale for forty bucks. Virginian echoes partaking only in lightly lit moods, should the pendulum move. Alone and yet so companied. Jelly truth. Wobbly. Sweet. It goes down easy. Killer stares and downward stairs towards PICU number two. A future we move to. Is there any fathomable care for where we might wander after dark? Spark the lamp. Can do but won’t. All the tasks of guru led leg breaking bore me now.
The next day we step out into the garden and look left towards the hills that we made in our mind’s eye the previous night. They were Thai or at least someplace East and of course holy. Into monastic smoke where neighbouring gunshots left pretty patterns like poetry paid me greener dreams. The scenes of this afternoon are better retold indoors, sat down on the comfy cushions, the ones occupied by the downtrodden and so beaten they only move their eyeballs and at best their limbs to dictate telepathy away and in a way so wayward it hurts to watch without harbouring a wilting, wanting woe.
Eclipsed in need of peace. The corridors are lips we kiss with our bare bellies, writhing north for want of release. From a dungeon or for the freedom are the remarks etched on the foreheads of Jerry and Jane. The hoodoo hero and hellbent heroine. The two rulers of this mess we marked in some calendar somewhere, May 2022. And yet, hush there, like a Hopkins snare or a Charlie Watts tap tang brush on previously battered drums doing the sums on slow song souls. Acting like Cooper was getting somewhere there until her therapy showed itself all closeup and bold in brightened black. Rose hips hopped. Like lager that’s left in the sun too long, there’s little fun left to have in this hospital.
Laugh all loaded hatred away into clouds. The clouds we tread in our heads. Our feet never leaving the concrete. Still too young to be numb. People all French revolution raving and or Mao China tattoo craving. All unknown to those Napoleons next door and to the many Jesus Christ superstars writing bars behind these locked doors. Hedonism led us here. Remember that.
Lemon tart for dessert. Custard hangs around in the pit of the bowl whilst we wander around in waltz wisdoms wanting ward wardom and digestif danger with some unknown stranger. I take the paper plane from under the table and cradle the sighs seen in solemn eyes, incapable of benevolence, seeing it or being it, as the folded A4 concord travels up and then soars to the tiles, making a few of us smile. Frost will come to freeze our feast at some point. All syrups and every honey will run wild, oozing itself golden for us goblins until we proclaim to be sweet enough.
Toasting our tirade against the high-grade care we are so lucky to have and so plucky to criticise. They never get to witness the unbridled joy of the Buddha as he sits beside us, making us feel ashamed only of seeing ourselves, should we see them sorrowfully. He sits softly, smiling wide and bright. He takes notes on his very own clipboard and passes on his findings to the psychiatrists in secret. All in secret. We proudly keep it. Clipboard to karmic clickbait. So, wait and be patient if you don’t want to find yourself a Ward 1 patient where it’s another form of apparition that dominates vision and dictates a different form of wisdom. A wisdom much more Western. There are no gardens there.
Up this cherry tree for now. Forgiven fruit. Something like that. Chat more and more to those mirrors and feel the shudder in your inner core, stacking laws of your own just like the frenzied philosophers of bygone centuries in their sanitoriums and asylums, paving the path to future psychoses, all in mind. To see these beautiful problems beyond reasonable doubt is a gift and a curse. Do you not yet see how nor why?
Make a vinyl of our own and watch it sit motionless on the turntable. Smattering of paint will remain forever there. Pinks, blues and greys. Neon light now it’s night, delaying lucid dreaming because the torchlight shining and beaming through the bedroom window reflects off the desk where the colouring pencils are. I’m moved to keep watch for the butterfly of this night sky. Several moths make messy movements, jealous and sad at the lack of appreciation they feel. They are guilty of making the many holes in these hospital pyjamas, pyjamas with multi coloured wording, making silly patterns all horizontal. Aesthetically pessimistic. The chance we had to dream has come to pass. The feeling that it’ll never return burns red and real.
Butter on toast for breakfast the next day. All our cutlery is conveniently plastic. More plastic than purple. Here we go again. Those colours appearing shamelessly in the plot once more. Something tells me that captain crayon is trying harder than ever to impress something on my psychosis. As if it is all actually very real after all and realer still than I’ll ever be led to believe. I have in mind the impossible, the incredible and inedible now becomes the buttered toast which I deemed relevant twenty seconds ago. A frayed book lies on the bottom most shelf of the brown bookcase to my right. Picking it up and pretending to read a few lengthy paragraphs seems like a good idea for Wednesday week.
Here come the alligators, snapping their camera jaws like sassy Paparazzi. 10:45 says the digital clock up there on the wall. A phone ringing yonder. Sunlight somewhere behind me. The builders are in to paint over the writing done by previous patients on ward bedroom walls. I wonder whether they’ll bother with the walls of room seventeen once I’m gone from it tomorrow. Reading the room then rendering fresh licks to all my lost logic.
*
Nature patiently pressed on patchwork paper.
Forever hocus-pocusly involved
With both man and maker.
We hit rock top with venomously vile,
Verbal journeys, until we got smacked
Down by the wizardry of “industry”
A word overheard in our quest for sublimity.
Taken by angels. Their wings exist
Within the ink of the patterns that we fashion.
Dionysus diagnosis.
Apollo will follow.
Until the virus of blindness
Dictates mediocre poker tomorrow.
Only a couple of cultures are bolstered
By movements of truth-hoods.
Still, the Maya is admired.
Cities were once built for higher sky scrape mind states.
If only molecular myth were visible through this molten mist.
Such solvent risk.
No more bulbous bliss.
Gated gold restricts,
Jesters trick and fortune exists
To extort the soul swift.
The Zeitgeist of those that die twice,
Whispers wishfully and warns us
Warmly of the many mysteries
Contained in Western dynasties.
Time, tempered rhymes and
Reasonable themes for artistic scenes
Enter left and exit via conscious streams
Of broken dreams.
And still, every heart beats alone.
Until the shades of hope come through
And sweep the landscape anew.
*
Two weeks free Tolworth Hospital. Out and about. As I cross the South London roads, I charge towards the green men. They disappear and I register ten seconds to go each time. I count down from 9,8,7- blink, gulp, step, looking up, hoping to luckily land on 3.
The next task is to catch a train, without eye contact from the London bustlers, street hustlers and underground buskers. I have finally seen the back of room seventeen, Lilacs Ward, within which I slept over fifty nights. Discharged at last. Freedom to roam, stretch these legs and tread the boards. The world’s a stage, now more than ever.
Back to the tracks. Both to those that link South Wimbledon and Tooting Broadway, and to the music, my music. As this tube rattles through the Northern Line tunnels, Nas intertwines this world of mine with his, and vice versa…
NAS: The thief’s theme, play us at night they won’t act right.
JIM: Who’s playing who?
NAS: Dwelling in a rotten apple, you get tackled, caught by the devil’s lasso, shit is a hassle…
“This is a Northern Line train to: High Barnet. The next station is Colliers Wood.” The doors slide to a close. This carriage now deserted.
JIM: What were you saying about rotten apples?
NAS: This rhythamatic explosion, is what your frame of mind has chosen.
JIM: I thought you meant Eden.
NAS: I'm twenty-one years past the 27 Club. It’s like I went back into my past and then I sped it up. Robert Johnson, Winehouse and Morrison found where heaven was.
JIM: James Dean too, right? After all, he couldn’t escape the allure of being Steinbeck’s hero.
Out onto the platform at Tooting Broadway. The orange display signals of following trains draws my eyes. 3 mins: Edgware. 8 mins: High Barnet. 11 mins: Edgware.
Round the corner we go. In between the two escalators we stride. Up the steps towards the night-time air…
JIM: What’s waiting for us up there?
NAS: Currency is made in the trust of the messiah.
JIM: I’m not sure if we’re on the same page.
NAS: My insight enlights vision and words of wisdom. Brothers pay me intuition, to listen…
JIM: (interrupts) Okay, continue… but I haven’t got long. I have an appointment, ten minutes from this station’s exit.
My appointment is at Tooting’s Recovery Café (a mental health centre for service users). Home is no good right now. I crave somewhere to house this ‘psychosis’. This episode: three months long. Paranoia. Delusional thought patterns. Schizo-affective disorder: Bi-Polar type. The truth is, no appointments can stem the tide tonight. I must be on the move. I oyster card my way out of the station and turn up the music in my headphones…
NAS: My man put the battery in my back, a difference from energizer. This sentence begins indented, with formality- my duration's infinite, money-wise or physiology. Poetry that's a part of me.
JIM: I’ll ask you again, before I lose any message you’ve tried to send my way: Who’s playing who?
NAS: Remember early mornings, syrup sandwiches, sugar water… Walking up the dark stairwells, elevators were out of order…
JIM: I’m lost.
Outside the doors of the Recovery Café, I buzz the bell. I check my phone for the time. No calls, texts or alarms, these past few hours. I swipe up to the playlist that’s carried me all the way here. I read the title of the current track: ‘I Gave You Power’. I skip. Next up comes: ‘The Message’. I skip again.
NAS: Reveal my life, you will forgive me, you will love me, hate me, judge me, relate to me…Only a few will, this is how it sounds when you’re too real. They think it's just music still…Well I am a graphic classic song composer, music notes on sheets, I wrote this piece to get closure.
JIM: Closure from what exactly? I’m totally confused.
NAS: Confused? While all the old folks pray to Jesus, soaking their sins in trays?
I hear a voice from the buzzer: “Hello, have you been here before?” I respond: “Yes.” The double locked door releases and I push it open. I begin to walk my way into the Centre, nervous of what next. I then pause to play back recent times in my mind. I remember now the parting words of the kind and wise psychiatrist, from Tolworth hospital, Dr Abraham. He told me: “Live in the present.”
Time now to block out the external voices and any other mental distractions. Time now to be ready for hard work ahead. Time now to realise that I’ve come too far to give in to further illness. Time now to seize the day. I take a deep breath, looking down to my phone to cut off the noise from my headphones, with the words: ‘The World Is Yours’, staring back at me.
*
Ardent arrow heads and sons of Malachi,
Breathe to your sky with sleep in your eyes.
Later dream deep of those clouds you’ve carefully memorised.
Potential for personhood partly paralysed.
Cracks in the jar softly symbolise
Parts of those lives you’ve had to sacrifice.
Ancient ash bearers, falcon saints and gun-sling greats
All drop their demons down the well and into hell.
No thoughts they make, nor do they dwell.
This could have been us as well.
Milan Kundera sits in a Liege bar,
Away from the tourist traps.
He is wooing a Swiss model.
Inspiration for his next novel.
Working title: Lost Air.
My mother then switches off the television and
Demands to see my homework.
Kundera is startled.
A cluster of old school friends join me
In a series of tasks to cheat death.
A neatly folded pile of clothes
Awaits me once this is done.
I put them on and salute the
Zen Master in the tower.
My father sails to Copenhagen with the Spaniard.
Sister now hunts alone.
Silence falls.
*
On week free from Tolworth hospital. Walking. Dressed in a blue and white checked shirt. Underneath it, a green t shirt. Dangling from my neck, a brown, beaded rosary. My red Converse shoes taking me up and down the streets of Southfields. Corners taken. More steps. Chasing phantom thoughts. Gripped by psychological salience. Painfully alert.
Every passing car: another numberplate to interpret. Each passer-by knows me, I’m sure of that. But how? And what do they want this time? I have been out of hospital for no more than a week. Acutely unwell? Yes, probably still.
The slight hills of this well-known town take me up and down and round and round. The July sky is blue, with but a wisp of cloud across the breadth of it. Tears threatening to wet the tarmac. If this occurs, keep walking. Remember, chin up and stride on.
Suddenly, I look up. Our local mosque is to my right. It is well secured with high gates. Its gardens immaculately kept beyond those gates and railings.
I call out between the railings and two men come out from inside to suss me out. After assessing me and my reason for being there, one of the men goes back inside. The second gentleman stands still to hear me out.
I speak of confession. Ramblings. There again, playing pickup 52 with my vocabulary. Confession, I say. Confection? He seems to ask. No, confession, my last confession! Your last confection? He says back. A clear emphasis on that pronunciation.
“Young man, whatever you are going through, I have been there. He (gestures to his comrade) has been there. It is not special.” These words slow the interaction down. “Okay”, I say. I turn to walk and set off further downhill, but he calls me back and says finally: “Remember, go the right way, not the wrong way. Be good.”
And with that, I was off to tread the pavements once more with a message of cast iron simplicity to try and cling on to with the July sun beating down harder than before.
*
Complex depths our brains have been dealt.
That’s why, once we’ve bottled up the genies,
We vanish like Houdini.
Across the border, there’s no space for reflection.
The past is a demon.
So, for now we’ll disguise that which we’re speaking.
Culture within us, forever tasked with deception.
There’s no ceiling, above me nor beneath you.
It’s the celestial ingredient we’re now reaching.
Do you remember, life in the whirlpool?
When “the moment” was circled?
When the future appeared purple?
Ever since then, we’ve been told to sit and reminisce.
But “the past” is a puzzle that we can’t solve.
Someday, I better quit living leftward.
This morning I pray that I stay on the right path,
Or else, I guess I’ll forever stumble into gutters, should I grow old.
I glimpse at the sunlit buildings,
Between the crack in my 3pm curtains.
Yesterday, I was back to the format of what felt like real life.
I was stood picturing pyramids and temples in my mental.
Now, at best it’s grey bricks
That flicker sunbeams into nothing but daydreams.
I’ve seen psychological destruction
In my fellow fiends hit hard.
Maybe it’s because we’ve all been starved of freedom
To walk these streets, that we re-abuse and repeat,
The bubble-gum of addiction, glued to our feet.
So, the lesson that’s stressed from this mess:
Thank big and forgive large.
Fall forward and run hard.
Forgive those never known by Neverland
Nor to Peter Pan’s plan.
You traded the orange trees of your
Father’s gardens for foreign land.
Gems swim through this blood stream.
So, when my brain bleeds it’s more treasure
I feed to the books we breed.
Anti-prophet logic?
Post-Kripke scripture, perhaps.
The quicker chapters nearer the back.
This jester pines for festered finds
Of yester-yearly crimes.
So best remind- the marred, the scarred, the jarred.
We’ve none, no stars, no more to lose.
Except the blues, riddled news and skittled clues.
I’ve slept a serpent snooze and
Kept a curtained fuse to switch the pitch.
So please, Bleed these sighs
To heaven’s skies not reddened eyes.
Via certainty we’ve certainly been chirped.
Slipped sly and left to drip dry.
That East, the same East you proudly
Preach but never reach is
The same East we got to
Glimpse beyond the beast.
Past comedy and hill-spent honesty,
Remember how she said it straight.
“Clap the Karma off the screen.
Snap the drama from the dream.
Track the actor ‘cross the screen.”
Alligators and perfect people equal
A trip wire treacle.
It’s rhymers and racoons who
Run best together in this world of ours.
Patterns and processed pauses,
Cunning claws and cutthroat clauses.
To the man who saw the rainbow:
Blessings upon him.
To the woman who climbed it:
Blessings upon her.
To the children born of both events,
Good luck.
Epilogue
In January 2023, I attended what would be my final meeting with psychiatrist, Dr Sako, at Queen Mary’s Hospital.
Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton: A place where, at the age of twenty, I spent thirty-one days and nights under Section. A site that has housed some of my wildest and darkest experiences. And yet, over ten years on, I think fondly of its shape and structure when imagined in my mind’s eye.
I remember my fellow patients from those times with warmth and empathy. I think to the sheer diligence of its staff. I have glossed over much of the trauma attached to that hospital experience with a thick, nostalgia labelled brush.
Having said that, as I walked up to the hospital entrance, on the day of that medical review, my senses sharpened, and my heart rate soared. Up until that point, I had only engaged with Dr Sako over the phone. For this reason, I was somewhat apprehensive.
Luckily, I found Dr Sako to be welcoming. He came across as both a kind and trustworthy man. For instance, he was gentle with his words and firm with his advice. In that meeting I sat directly opposite Dr Sako, whilst his assistant typed away on a laptop, recording our conversation and no doubt monitoring my demeanour. I often found someone sat watching on with a laptop, a major intrusion but with Dr Sako in charge, I moved past any potential irritation.
Initially, Dr Sako asked me some customary questions, regarding my diet and sleeping pattern. He checked in on how my abstinence from alcohol was going. I was pleased to inform him that I was continuing to abstain from drinking. Dr Sako then told me that he had been going over my records. From my records, he had concluded that my diagnosis of schizophrenia was insufficient. He believed a diagnosis of ‘schizoaffective disorder’ was more apt. The difference between the two, he told me, was that the latter entails a mood imbalance.
I was rather pleased to hear this. Egotistically, perhaps. To see myself as misunderstood, how fitting! But more objectively speaking, to have been misdiagnosed... now what did that mean?
I had experienced symptoms of Schizophrenia; delusions, visual hallucinations and other abnormal thought patterns when I was within an episode of psychosis, but not in the time before or after. My three episodes of psychosis lasted three to four months at a time. Schizophrenia and its symptoms cover those periods, sure. But what about the many years when I was functioning, working and dare I say it ‘well’?
I reflect on this question, as I sit and type in November 2023, having last experienced those manic symptoms of schizophrenia/ psychosis in July 2022.
The truth is, I have not been ‘well’ since July 2022, nor I now realise was I ‘well’ in the many months and years in between my three episodes of severe illness, dating back to September 2012. Dr Sako’s reassessment has allowed me to see things more clearly.
So, what have I seen?
A diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder helps me see that I have been living daily with a ‘severe’ mental health condition for over ten years and not merely ‘recovering’ from being ‘severely’ ill. Furthermore, the addition of a mood disorder to my diagnosis describes many of the challenges I have faced in the years 2012-present. As world famous physician, Gabor Mate states: ‘A diagnosis is not an explanation it is a description.’ My experiences of depression, addictive behaviours and post-traumatic stress (post psychosis) can now be seen as part of a long-term condition not as things I should have been getting over or conquering.
A schizoaffective disorder accounts for the above in a clinical way and this, I tell you, comes as a something of a relief. Perhaps I wasn’t guilty of “feeling sorry for myself” repeatedly. Conversely, perhaps I was wrong to downplay "being down” just because I had as a comparison how very bad things could get (paranoia, delusions, hospital). Ultimately, I suspect that I gave myself a harder time than necessary because, I couldn’t understand or accept why every time I had a good run of form, I would consistently be brought back down to earth and then lowered into the depths of my duvet and placed under clouds of self-contempt for days at a time.
Now living and working in Cornwall, I have undergone both a geographical and career change. The Atlantic Ocean is in view from my window. My workplace is a five-minute stroll from my apartment. I am lucky to be working with a supportive brother and with kind colleagues. What more could I ask for, at this point in my life?
Facts are, despite my once upon a time wish of sailing towards an illness free future, I am starting to accept that depression will continue to come round and knock on my door. Ordinarily, I keep the beast at bay. However, there are times when depression breaks on in and consumes me. Into that grey rhythm I go. Numb and uninspired.
If I think back to how periods of depression used to be, years ago… For months at a time, I would be in bed at every opportunity. Radio on. Half-asleep. Flat. Depression was, for a few years (2013-2016), coupled with a constant state of intense anxiety. From the years 2016-2022, I managed to shed the cloak of social anxiety and function better both at work and in social settings. However, depressive tendencies still dominated over any other form of mood.
Today, on Thursday 16th November 2023, I believe myself to be just out the other end of one of my depressive periods. This period began to seep in four weeks ago and peaked over the weekend just gone. An intense experience as ever, but it came to pass more quickly than usual.
Depression is now understood by me as an inevitable part of my condition. Right now, the Buddhist teaching of ‘suffering better’ resonates strongly with me. I hope that there is a healthy triangulation at work between me A) recently being able to define my condition, B) doing positive things to prepare for dips in mood C) Depressive periods shortening in length.
Now, you might think acknowledging a more extensive diagnosis gives me the right to rest on my laurels and find excuses for being unwell. I reject this wholeheartedly. Czech author, Milan Kundera states in his novel, Life is Elsewhere: ‘If the poet says yesterday that the world is a vale of tears and then today that the world is a land of smiles; he is right both times.’ Kundera’s poet shows us that both joy and sorrow are in the eye of the beholder. Empowered by education of my condition, I am at liberty to compassionately re-frame my past in order to take full personal responsibility for what happens in the here and now.
My intention must then be to make the most of opportunities where I am free from depression. In order to create a healthier ‘future me’. A future me that can be of benefit to my family, my friends and my community. A future me that can pay back the support I have received over the years from so many. And if depression comes knocking within that future, and heaven forbid any more psychosis, may it be short lived and may I learn something from it.