LOCKED-IN

Just when you think life is wonderful do you get the cancerous news or wake from a fucking stroke.

Peter sat in a wheelchair smoking his pipe looking out at another grey day trying to remember

His past, for ten years now he had been locked in a moment of disability.  In April two thousand

and five he took a stroke that erased forty five years of memory and left him in a wheelchair

Paralyzed down the right side.  When he first took the stroke he couldn’t talk and spent a year in

hospital undergoing intensive speech physio and occupational therapy, trying to prepare him for the

world.  After 10 months they sent him to the royal to have an operation on his throat he regained

speech but he mumbled words and his volume was very low so any background noise drowned it. 

He lived life in silent loneliness, in such a depressing world that he pulled back from any contact with his family and felt that the only person that could help him was him.

He had to find a way to get on with life so he created a blog for his writings and artwork at least that

gave him a little hope.

 

UNEM-PATHETIC

We all live this social net-

work but there’s two sides

to every story.   Even for

a shell like, like me.                      

I’m not here to offend or

                                         Lower the tone, reflecting

                                         My darkness upon your light.

                                             But I do belong here, even

                                                              If I have lost my core.

Pomes without memory

Are belittling blues.

A shell like that lives in

A Christian mews, we

All live under grief.

                                 I’m just a hollow man

                                           At Halloween 2015.

                                            Searching for hope

                                            In a hopeless world.

                                                Is this world war

                                                    Five or ten?

Lost con-fused in

A suicide mode

Without even

A greed bar-code

In 20-5-10-15.

                                Just cause you believe

                                Some guy as hanging

                                 Around, that don’t give

                                 You the right to my

                                               True blues.

They say it takes two

To tango, when will

You fox-trot me.

                                When I pluck

                                             A shadowed

                              Flower to clench

Between my teeth

Oh-lay!

Before his stroke he wrote poems and had four books of poems published by Lagan and Lapwing press Belfast, teaching creative writing and working as an arts development officer.

He spent a year looking out the hospital window desperately trying to restore memory through

poetry and art, he was like a baby reborn an adult.  After the stroke that almost killed him he woke

seconds after his life support was switched off and he was declared dead.  Since then he hadn’t really

got any better but learnt to do things with one hand and mumble like a drunk and lives an

independent life alone in a disabled bungalow.

He woke from the stroke in this world without substance, he couldn’t remember his family and even his own children, of which he had three Glenn, Dean and Kern who felt like acquaintances to him, he had no emotional memory of them although he witnessed their births and it was one of the greatest days of hislife but he had no memory of that great day.  One of six children, he had no memory of his own childhood.  His family and friends were like people he knew for some unknown reason, he remembered people and places from the past but the detail was just a blur.

He remembered he lived in a cottage in the middle of no-where but even that could be a figment

so the truth of this story is up to you to place him in the first or third person.

Peter was born the son of a bastard who was abandoned on the terraced doorstep on the north side of

Belfast.  His father grew to hate peters sensitive poetic side he said to his mother he needed to much

attention.  Peter’s mother was the most whole human being he had ever met so he went everywhere

with her.  She was the queen of his hive, the bastard father knew this to, he was jealous of peters way.

His father was a so called hard man who grew up on the streets of Belfast.

Peter grew up without contact with his father, the bastard son who reinvented himself everywhere he

went.  Peter seen through his lies and his way of coning people into his way of thinking

his father was a con artist calling people Jim or john to get them on his side then he could manipulate

them, peter watched this con trick for years and must admit he was good at gaining people’s confidence but there was always a motive in his madness.  He even used and abused Peters mothers good nature.  little did they know that he lied even to himself calling himself Jim, john, joseph or Sean, they were his alias names.  He didn’t know who he was, Peter wasn’t even sure of his name never mind his memory. 

His mother was born on the south side of Dublin a gentle woman who’s mother left Dublin with her

family after losing her husband, a young soldier who died of T.B.   Ireland was a difficult land

growing into an independent state. 

They met in London and were married in a registry office and had six children in six different towns and cities his father was running from his past.  Peter looked out at the wild garden and the fence that

hemmed him in, he watched two birds on the far roof and tried to conjure up a memory from his

Childhood but nothing came only the grey lonely cloud.  The moments drifted on and on for him it felt like he was serving his father’s time, he even thought of killing himself but felt he hadn’t got the right,this was nature’s game so she can play it her way he thought.  He attempted it once before but he swore to himself that if he survived it he could never try it again, that was the deal he had made, all he got from the overdose was a good buzz. 

He was born in Kent England but couldn’t remember his childhood just his older brother in a pedal car From a black and white photograph he seen in his mother’s album.  It was as if he was caught on a loop of life without memory like a merry go round without the merry, with no way off.  No parole or good Friday agreement or time off for good behavior, he lived in a world of melancholy that most couldn’t even comprehend.

People looked at him from their right wing place of comfort children were baffled and infants just cried and who can blame them he thought who in their right mind wants a broken man who can’t walk talk or work, he had to live in a pointless existence, life was a shit hole but it was his shit-hole.

Love of any kind needs a purpose a goal in life and yet every way he looked at his condition there was no way in or out.  Life was locked within and the only way out was death, this is the dogs honest truth whether we like it or not.  He believed that he passed through life and death because he had no hatred in his heart, he believed that the true road to light and peace was to laugh at the horrors of life like Samuel Beckett or Spike Milligan, cosmic comic genius.