Dream poem 89: Disingenuous Back Problems

There are three or four of us with back problems.
I am across town
teaching a community class
outside is a ‘Back Problems Van’.

Later the van is at Kirkstall Abbey
I return with Pudsey people to go to the ‘Back Van’

It is a lengthy day
of seeing doctors and nurses
and procedures
but at l the end of it our backs are better.

I am the first one through
and I see the assembled doctors
and thank them for their intervention.

And I say
“My back had been previously so bad that
I couldn’t even put the handbrake on or lift a child without pain
Now it is completely well”

Even as I am saying it
I felt completely disingenuous.

My back had not been that bad for years.
As for lifting the kids
At thirteen and fifteen
I do not carry or lift them at all anymore.

I felt it was what the doctors wanted to hear
especially the lady doctor.
She wanted us to be grateful
She wanted to make a difference.
It was part of a script that should be said.

She was very tired
and had been doing the same thing for a long time,
long hours with ingrate patients.

At the same time as she wanted thanks, she also didn’t believe me
She looked tired and jaded
But accepted my attempts.

I returned to the centre and collected my paintings
The Pudsey people were there waiting
for their turn to give a speech.


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 co...
Read more
Image
Blackbird Egg Time slows down in the Victorian mirror. She is haunted by every face that checked themselves in the glass. She is on the cusp. A life about to begin in earnest, on the tipping point of adulthood. On the apex of future relationships, sexuality and desire. “Yes” she says, “that’s me in the mirror”, long brown hair, grey-blue eyes. She is just an ordinary brown bird. But common or garden blackbirds create sky eggs, objects of beauty and desire. Each one speckled slightly differently in the genus. If only she can create of herself such an object of yearning, her small brownness will be worth the transformation. On the Hall-stand crafted in a grand antique style, are a collection of blackbird’s eggs. Saved in small glass containers with their lids tight shut. Through the glass she sees pale blue specked eggs, broken with raggedy edges. The armoire ominously overshadows her slight fourteen year old self. Whom she sees reflected back in multiple mirrors, framed in the warm glea...
Read more

Chap Book #3 Gone With The Wind

Image
  Delighted to be published in:-  https://www.cistaarts.com/product-page/chapbook-series-3-gone-with-the-wind Learning craft from the wind   There was once a woman. Who learned craft from wind, art from the sea and design from the earth. She sewed intricate organic patterns in labyrinthine repeats. Her creativity was celebrated through the land. She was known as La Corachine, beautiful shell of the sea. Her daughter Powys was as natural as the elements, precious as comfort and radiant with gold-nature. One day an old woman coloured like an autumn day came to their door. “I want what is yours.” She said, and stuck a pin into the girl, who transformed into a brown-bird and flew off. “Old woman”, cried the mother, please cook a meat and potato pie for us. “Of course”, she sang, catching the brown-bird-daughter. And made her into a pie with potato skins. The leftover bones she threw into a corner of the garden. In three days, a beautiful tree g...
Read more