I wrote this poem following a sincerely difficult period of my life where each day felt like an uphill battle against a blackness that seemed to plague each and every passing day. I was struggling to sleep, think, motivate myself and generally function.
For anyone who has faced or faces a similar phase in their life – whether you feel lost, demotivated, downhearted or like the world just isn’t working in your favour – I offer this poem. I offer it as an outburst against those negative noises that gnaw at our very core. I offer it as an illustration that even the sheerest sadness can help fuel the fiercest of fires. And I offer it as a thank you to everyone who helped me come in from the storm and get dry again.
Stay strong. Always.
I smash my head off the desk and
feel the swirl and the unfurling of this mesh that
holds tight, much to my distress, to all of my deepest, darkest regrets
and insists on pulling tight until, choking, I’m awoken in the night to
shadows carving chaos across my walls, slow and painful, a nightmare’s drawl
in a tongue I used to speak, eking out every syllable, every phoneme makes me weak
and, “just for once?” “maybe this week?” maybe I’ll make a difference or have something that I can
keep, something I can stick with magnets to my fridge, that I can boast about
to my kids that I haven’t conceived yet but I’ve already outlived in this
second-guessing, second-rate mind that won’t stop pounding in my sleep so with gnawing teeth
I grind, and oh boy do I grind, every phatic flutter of my meek, emasculated cheek until the
blood in my mouth is just blood on your hands, on the fingertips of everyone who’s carried me
and wills me to stand.
I smash my head off the desk.
I smash my head off this desk, feel the wood
from some down-on-his-luck oak, who sold his body so his family wouldn’t
know just how fierce this forest really is, feel his spirit cloaked in mud, sweat and
tears croak beneath the sickened bone of my skull, feel the dull hum of the countless,
number-choked days poke poke poking at my purpose like I’m some dumb joke, like
this punchline is just a cheap, yellowed line of coke that blusters in my sinuses
like a poisonous virus insistent that I keep on breathing, that I inhale it all in, that we, that us –
this circus of clowns with the millennial bug, this swig of disheartened dust from
fires we once stoked – get used to giving up and stop hoping that one sunny afternoon with
champagne being supped we’ll sign on
the contract of The Rest of Our Lives in congealed blood and
finally we’ll have the money. Finally.
finally we’ll have 10 million followers on the web,
and like spider-licked greenflies they’ll sit, wrapped and in our debt, rapt in the rancid
reek of our spit, getting hard from each hit, from every click of the mouse and every drop,
every
drip,
every ounce of their attention, of their wit,
will dangle before us like Ruby Roman grapes and as we lick our chops and count our coin
I smash my head off the desk.
I smash my head off this desk and
my voice is so loud as I retch, every tastebud boiling in every swallow I fetch,
I reach for words I’ve never spoken and that I’ll never digest, words to explain away
this delirium, this disturbed drumming that I collect that
taps like toothpicks against the enamel of my head, the sheer fizzing fury that
steals away in my bed, that patters, punches behind my eyelids until all semblance of sleep is
dead.
we break bread on Sundays; drink wine. On Mondays we work instead, treading carefully in case we
get our creativity wet, whetting our imagination with mundanity
until it’s so blunt, so uninspired it’s a rug, some throwaway carpet by the fires where we once
made love, coveting the flickers of shadow on the feathers of skin, breathing each other in
until our lungs were black with the smoke of our sin, the grace of
passions and unknowns – and we grin. Our fingers sunk in so deep like darts in the boards
on the wall, triple 20 and charging unchained like a bull down a hall with
china cups overflowing with the rapture, the sensation of it all that
we say we’ll never let go.
and yet here we are: Adam and Eve, some evening in the fall, using dead leaves to hide our deader
sense of awe, enveloping our genitals in sewage so raw that its stench
is a fist uppercutting our massive drooling jaw
as we binge and feast and waste and scream for more
and more and more
and
I smash my head off the desk.
I smash my head off this desk and leave
it smashed, feel the blood pool like parents at the school gates at 3:30
so desperate for something pure, driving home and the background noise is just aches
and longing for before: to be the kiss chasers and not the pub waiters, to be the duck duck goose
and not the voice at the other end of the phoneline that fits like a noose after
34 goddamn minutes of holding, to hear the same ridiculous excuse that
nothing can be done so what’s the use? “What’s the point?”
What’s the use of striving for success? What’s the use of sifting, of looting, of
breaststroking through this boiling, curdling soup of a mess that
is spooned down our throats despite our protests, in spite of the
CPR being hailstoned on our chests just so we can expand our ribcage on a loop, so our heart
will never fail to recoup, never cease to beat and bang and thud and thwack
and catapult us forward, never fail to keep on track: running shoes and protein shakes
infiltrating our primitive programming like some computer hack, zeros
and ones whipping off our windshield as we
swerve and accelerate
towards our inevitable fate because – for the love of fuck! –
we couldn’t bear to be late
I smash my head off the desk.
