Month: February 2020

Enough

Published on by Sarah DruryLeave a comment

WARNING: REFERENCES TO SELF HARM AND SUICIDE

Mental health is a topic very close to my heart, and not only do i have my own issues, but my twelve year old son too. There is simply not enough provision for mental health, especially child and adolescent. This poem was inspired by a documentary that was on a couple of weeks ago. Broke my heart. NB My son is not suicidal, he has anxiety issues, but many kids are.

Enough

When you’re twelve years old and you’ve had enough
Of this sickened, filtered, twisted, rifted
Motive shifted, Kardashian tit-lifted world
When days are knocking on the doors of empty houses
Gazing through windows of opulence
But at night you’re there again, sleeping rough
In this maze of mental health
In this haze of giving up cos life’s too fucking tough.

So a pill’s a pill
So what if you knock back a death sentence?
What if you let your soul bleed and your tears spill?
And the pills slip down, down
Emotions drowned, regrets not making sounds
Years of heartache and sadness driving your pain to the ground
Pain to the pill to the pill to the pain
Who gives a shit if you sit here and cry again?
No one dares to see you, sane or insane
Hurtling along like a broken bowling ball
in the pre-teen child psychiatry lane.

When you’re twelve years old
And suicide is the coat you covet
And you wear the hat of a depressed diplomat
Playing self-harm cricket with a knife and not a bat
And with each hurt comes another scar
And with each hurt comes another scar
And with each hurt comes another scar
And twinkle, twinkle little scar
I see your tears, I see your fears, I feel your pain from afar
So why doesn’t anyone
Fucking help me?

Is it those poison ivy girls again?
Do their tongues clack their tickety-boo nonsense?
Churning words of insults cursed,
Jealousies
Wickedness in unrehearsed dramas
They know how to hurt the hurting
And the hurting know how to hurt.
You are worth so much more
If your strength would rise up and thrust a fist
through the floor
Of their house of sticks
Then maybe the sticks and stones would break THEIR bones.

When you’re twelve years old
And you’ve had enough of the merciless world
But the world hasn’t had enough of you
And you’re trying to lose your feeble grip
But the world keeps clinging on
And you’re exhausted and your soul is void and blue
And you wish everyone would just fuck off
Just fuck right off
And you could do this suicide thing
You could finally see it through.

But the world hasn’t had enough
Of you

©2020 Sarah Drury

Vivaldi

Published on by Sarah DruryLeave a comment

Ode to that bloody awful music you get when you ring the DWP! And the way they compartmentalise our disabled kids!

Vivaldi
Your timeless beauty sounds so ugly
In its incessant, perpetual monotony
On the end of this goddamn phone
Streamed into had-enough ears
As I wait
As I wait
As I wait
My last thread of patience almost gone
My son a statistic
As you sit in your ivory tower offices
Ticking criteria boxes
Playing God but Godless
Not giving a flying fuck
That my kid is a human being
Not some faceless scrounger
Not some work shy loser
Not some benefit fraudster
Just a child.

Vivaldi
Never had perfection
Sounded so brash, so annoying
Like salt rubbed into raw, bleeding wounds
Waiting for a ‘how can I help you?’
Waiting for the punchline to the joke
The pretence
The ‘we care’ rhetoric
But in their defence
They deal with pounds and pence
Not hearts.

Vivaldi
Whilst my child can walk, can talk
What the fuck do you know?
He eats, he sleeps, his mind is set on go slow
He has a learning disability
He tries, his mind denies him
Of a ‘normal’ life
His condition a serrated knife
With jagged aspirations.
But he can walk, he can talk
He eats, he sleeps
That is all you need
You do not see him
Yet your protocol has agreed
To reduce his benefits.
Like some germinated seed
Who is yanked from the ground
And tossed into the gutter
To save a pound
While the voice of my spirit resounds
In futile, hostile whispers.

Vivaldi
I hope one day you know what it is like
To have a child with a disability
To raise a soul with a differing ability
So that you develop empathy
Where there was apathy
So that sympathy spreads its comforting palms
Around torn, worn parents
So that understanding spews from mouths
Of those invested in the system
So that disabled kids are not pawns
In austerity
So that politics are not a mitigating factor
In this cancer we call an equal, enabling society.

©2020 Sarah Drury

I Am Not a Meme

Published on by Sarah Drury2 Comments

I am a mother
An Autism mother
I browse the forays of Facebook
Forgetting the lakes of purples and blues
Decorating my limbs in myriad hues
Pools of rage and emotional instability
Because my Autistic son has the demonic ability
To inflict hurt.

I cringe at the memes. Why am I not more like them?

‘God found some of the strongest women
And made them Autism mums’

Well God must’ve been having a fucking joke
For who wants the slightest fleck of instability
To turn into a tempestuous liability
Who wants the fighting and screaming and cursing
Blue tinged words and searing guilt immersing
Who wants the depression looming
The stress, the headaches booming
God must have misjudged my capabilities
For I’m tearing my fucking hair out with my inability
To be strong for God.

‘Autism doesn’t come with a manual,
It comes with a parent who never gives up’

And I sit here praying for a miraculous amnesty
Nursing my wounds and lamenting my agony
I wish I had that fucking Autism bible
I wish that Shakespeare had written plays about mothers like me, unstable
Spinning round on an infernal neurosis turntable
Mothers who just don’t feel in control, don’t feel able
Who give up every single day
Give up every single fuck
When every second is grey
When the depression comes out to play.

‘If you think my hands are full
You should see my heart’

And my hands juggle some perpetual pandemonium
And I sing these insane songs like a psychotic harmonium
Shit in one heavy hand and giggles in the other
Feeling like an abject, joyless excuse of a mother
And my heart is close to breaking, so close to tears
Patched together by remnants of hope interjected with paranoid fears
If you could really see my heart, you’d see a twisted thorn
All those times I’ve lost my patience and after I’ve sworn
To be a better mum
To be a better mum

For this is an Autism house and I am the mother
And I’m not a fucking meme
I’m a human, another

Soul drowning

In Autism memes.

©2020 Sarah Drury

Don’t Call Me Baby

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Hey you
With your misogynist mouth
And your sexist salubrious sarcasm

Call me sassy
Call me badass
Call me spunky
Call me gutsy
But DON’T call me baby!

Hey you
With your miniscule dick on fire
and your brain in your balls

Call me fearless
Call me feisty
Call me brave
Call me powerful
But DON’T call me baby!

Hey you
With your ‘I am master’ fallacy
Buying tits and asses fantasies

Call me strong
Call me equal
Call me curious
Call me bold
But DON’T call me baby!

Hey you
Tossing dollars at the hookers
Fucks are cheap, women disposable

Call me competent
Call me smart
Call me interesting
Call me determined
But DON’T call me baby!

Hey you
With your lamborgini carriage
Cos your dick’s so fucking non existent

Cal me assertive
Call me confident
Call me positive
Call me successful
But DON’T call me baby

Hey you
With your patronising passport
To a world in which we’re second

Call me a woman
Call me an equal

But DON’T call me baby!

©2020 Sarah Drury

Debbie

Published on by Sarah DruryLeave a comment

My heart goes out to these women who sell their bodies for whatever reason, be it for food, rent, drugs, drink. I used to live in the middle of town and would often encounter them. One of my neighbours was a prostitute. This poem was inspired the women and also a character in ‘I, Daniel Blake’.

Debbie is a hooker
In her £10 heels on feet that flail
Needy in seedy side streets
Breasts revealed, an advertisement
Far from suckling babes and choked in clingfilm swathes
Spider lashes shading a web of silk spun secrets
Scarlet lips kissed only when the price is right
Or taken by force in her moments of weakness.

Debbie is a hooker
With her dreams of fame and her acts of shame
Three GCSE’s
And a diploma in shagging punters
A degree in peddling her merchandise
A commercialised vagina for fuck hungry hunters.
Trawling the shadows for the price of a Sunday Roast
No praying on Sundays for the blessings of the Holy Ghost.
If she lived in times of Jesus, she would be his best friend
But the people’s God doesn’t agree with Jesus
She’s a woman of disgust in her life which is dead end.

Debbie is a hooker
And the punters flock like hungry pigeons
Feeding on fucks and not on bread
Another vagina with a faceless face
Another disposable screw, another depositary in the human race
They are stealing her dignity and fucking a metaphor for broken
Every man that she takes, every orgasm she fakes
Every lie of pleasure she has silently spoken.

Debbie is a hooker
As dirty money passes by hands of filthy lust
A pound coin for a pound of flesh
A fiver for a blowjob as the legs open and the groins thrust
Paper notes as thin as the skin which separates the shame from the futility within
And when it’s a choice between starve or commit a sin
The Godless career path wins.

Debbie is a hooker
She drips in droves of salubrious shame
She lives in anonymity, a woman without a valid face or name
She would feel helpless, but feelings are soon numbed
She feels like dirt and fear and by society shunned

Debbie is a hooker
She pays the rent with every punter
And sells her soul for food for the table
She has three kids to feed and a boyfriend who is unable
To keep his fists away from his possession
She lives in fear at this brutal man’s obsession
The loan sharks knocking every day on her door
The interest rises, and they want more, more, more

Debbie is a hooker
A victim of our uneconomical society
where jobs are slim, and unemployment leads to
twists in our sobriety
she slinks the streets, a question mark in the integrity of humanity
where women are a commodity and prostitution no longer a profanity
a reality since the beginning of the lust of men, in time
giving her body for a tenner, giving her dignity for a dime.

©2020 Sarah Drury