Breast Diaries 4

Why is she going for counselling?
Anger
Grief
Moving on
Permission to let it go
Waiting for the clog to drop
Waiting for a meltdown.
To freefall
To turn herself inside out.
And then will she stop being afraid?

She have a hole in me that she has obsessively and compulsively filled with chocolate, alcohol, smoking, God, working, making my life so full she can’t think, food, keep fit, dancing, dieting, running, writing, making art, not in that order and some consecutively and some at the same time.

She is gurning and grinding and consuming life like a great cement mixer.

Stop being afraid? No that plague rat is her friend.
Like an old sock in the basket, she has been turned and turned again.
Theseus has visited her and tied his red string around her little finger, there will be no free-falling.
Chemically induced menopause is sizzling her softly but melting is for butter in a pan.
That clog has been dropped down a shaft, it is not ever going to hit the coal face.
Letting go – not her style she is a gripper, a hanger on and mussel on a rope.
Moving on? It is all locked away, in her box which also contains child birth, divorce, loss and cancer.
Grief is a black boot drawn in a black book, lost in a damp mouldering cellar.
As for anger, it is her prime motivator in all things, it’s the fire that gnaws, ember red.
It is her helper, her creativity, it keeps her doing, fighting, raring to go.
I Don't think she needs that counselling after all  
not today.



images by Frances Norton


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Collect Art Publication July 2023

Image
 First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition Stone all the flowers   The year of the art school tutorials. The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to you. The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.   Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters together. As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger. As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.   Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences with him. Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. She, in the face of all this decay   Chooses to destroy flowers with stones. Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their elemental pigments.   She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun. It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the flower fades (Isiah 40:8). She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine cotton Lawn.   Flower tortu
Read more

Five Pandemic Poems

Image
 Five Pandemic Poems 1. Solitary 2. At the bird sanctuary 3. Writing practice 4. Closing the chapter 5. Icon eyes                                              Image from Unsplash Open Source. 1.  Solitary  I could be a fifty-three-year-old woman. Living post-cancer. In a world where cancer is suddenly not the biggest, baddest virus on the Block. All the emotions I dealt with about a growing death within me. Harbouring an enemy in my breast. My habits during illness of self-imposed quiet, solitary days. The lore of stay home, stay safe. Now everyone experiences this in the time of lockdown, in a pandemic.                                              Blackbird Rainbow, by Frances Ann Norton 2.  At the bird sanctuary Its so hard growing up, my beautiful brave girl. The moment you were put into my arms after a long labour I knew you were a fighter, an old soul, determined and singular. You withstand your greatest health burden with magnanimity, dignity and stoic
Read more
Image
  https://www.haus-a-rest.com/new-page-72 Fantastic to have two poem selected for the Haus-A-Rest zine issue 39. Artschool and what it did or did not tell you.  The Ontological Art School and What I Learned There In a game of solitaire, I am dealt a number of random cards – these are my social locators. Where and when I was born and my parents, these things are out of my control. Just like the cards I have been dealt. Knowing and understanding my locators is like playing a game strategy. Making the best use of the cards I have. This is my ontology of the art school. My parents met at post-war art school in the 1940s. Their evenings were filled with philosophical and art theory discussions at the jazz clubs. The ontological context of the art school for me was in the wider community too. My sister and I grew in a network of artists, musicians, poets and designers. I thought everyone lived like this. We I spent our chodhood in the corridors and classrooms of the loc
Read more