What became of Mary-Jane?
She took drugs to ease the pain
But it wasn’t the drugs
That damaged her brain
It was life
That drove her insane
BY
Louise M Hart
Performance Anxiety
By
Louise M. Hart
It’s the not knowing that does me in
Should I let the head shrinkers work on my symptoms
or uncover my original sin?
Like a spider clinging to the bottom of a web
will I secure my fall
or climb up until I am 6 feet tall?
Hanging with the other arachnoids and tall men
who look down their legs at the littleun
projecting a too, too solid pain in the arse
Of a middle name
The use of the initial M
elevates me above all common women
and men
Caught in the moment
between now and then and then and now
when each breath signifies silence’s
mass history of sublimated violence
and a handshake a final bow
I am too far up to let myself die
Aloof from the crowd
like the poet sitting at the back of the room
wearing a silly hat and a perpetual frown
My spidery web breaks
and I fall to the ground
My suffering finally ends
I think I think
Therefore I am
not
I think I’m not
In Two Minds (Schizophrenia)
Knots of thought
Strike and bite like teeth
My beleaguered psyche
Tearing it in two
Two voices for every thought
Two thoughts for every voice
Like shredded strands
They fray at the edges
With me
Psychically, in the middle
Adrift on waves of suffering
A piggy in a middle boat
Without an oar
A bore paddling
Towards shifting sands
I stammer along
For I am distresses daughter
I never rest
But am nevertheless
True to my selves
Feelings fall
Like cripples
In a nameless street
Of no affect or interest
Then a ripple of knowledge
Arises
And I realise why
I read R. D. Laing at college
By
Louise M. Hart
Coventry Blood, Brummy Heart
Coventry blood, Brummy heart
You have made me
There is no one on earth who can save me
And no State machine will enslave me
The train brought me here
Poetry and beer
Made me freer
Birmingham you are as queer
As the poem I once wrote
About all the girls I have never loved
Before…
When I was a childe
I walked as a childe
(Harold died for Maude
I live to die)
Around the City Centre
The bright lights called me
The shops, the shops, the shops
Enticed me through their doors
Adorning fleshy architecture
I tried not to bore
With my prosaic presence
Brummy women and men
Who were so much prettier
Their conversation far wittier
Than her indoors, aka, Cov(en)tary
Coventry blood, Brummy heart
You have untamed me
But no one can persuade me
That I am amazing
So I amazed me
And read my bloody awful poetry
In pubs and cafes for free
Whilst the audiences shouted for Jasmine Gardosi
Elegy to my Mother
By
Louise M. Hart
Your body betrays you
It is a ghost of its former self
A crumpled hand
Caresses a toiled brow
Not long now
Not long now
But, you are a warrior
The bearer of two
You have watched men
Come and go
Infants and oafs, in skin
Thinner than the curve of your lips
Narrower and shallower lives
Than the hips that bore me well
Mother, I love you so
I am joyous in your presence
I laugh and cry in equal measures
In bursts of simultaneous ebbs and flows of emotion
That sooth and reveal how I feel about you
You fill my days with thoughts
Rich and deep
Invade my dreams
Whilst in the froes of sleep
Mother, you made me
So, now, I shall make you
Immortal
In words that rhyme eternal, wondrous and true
Everyone is Psychotic
I am the madwoman’s attic
My walls are lined with abandonment
And static
My Insides are wood and glass pain
Everyone is psychotic
Quixotic psychotropic drugs
Blight our lives
In the haze of our smoke substitutes
We choke on the ash
Of our fragrant decay
And smell of fear
And replacement nicotine milieu
Unclean in the rear of our heads
We rub the behinds of our scalps minds
Until they bleed plumes of rosebud red
The universe speaks with the voice of unreason
Sanity is so last season
But is positively appealing
To those who are psychotically unreal
And believe that existence is but a delusional idea
That we are all free to think, act
And feel
I am sanity’s self-lover
I masturbate undercover of logic’s single sheet of belief
Everyone is psychotic
Except me-
Who am too, too sane
To be real
Louise M. Hart (2017)
Big Bren gets Shaved, 8th July 2017
We watched the Big Man being shaved
My pocket containing ten pounds
And Michelle
With her illusory beard
But I bought 2 drinks, anyway
“It’s a beautiful thing,” I thought
“Sacrificing your hair for charity”
And the lamb remained in stillness
Like a 21st century Buddha
Whilst anxiety gripped me
Like a gynaecologist’s fist
From the bottom of my empty pocket
To the nicotine tips of my conscience
My Mother and I had argued, you see
Before I left home
So I fooled myself that I wasn’t all bad-
Pneuma in a cage of beer and cigarette smoke
But smiled, like Satan’s symbiotic sister
Until Patrick walked me to the bus
And my smiles became tears, I didn’t shed
For a Man
Women make better friends, they said
Nails bite like incisors into soft, warm flesh
Women are fluid
Then I took
A man with big hands and enormous feet
Whose hair tickles parts of me
About which my Mother didn’t tell
Fingers that sing tricky tunes of love
The bee’s sting of desire
I know women
But I love a man
I am not a traitor to my sisters’ cause
Punching my fist in the face of ideological rejection
I am the projection of
Purity
Love
Truth
Merely human
Louise M. Hart
Ode to Ruby Rose
Your hair is sunlight
Illuminating your face
Strands like fingers
Supplying
Sweet caresses
To your skin
Of silken lace
Mine is brittle
Whose strands betray
And belittle
The pulp that lies
Beneath my eyes
Flesh ruddy and hostile
Your breath kisses the wind
Mine is stained with the scent
Of cigarettes and sin
I have lived amongst men
But love only women
You love none
More than yourself
And display your body
For a living
I display my mind
And am a dying monument
To life upon the shelf
Your eyes shine like cerulean
And the diamonds you wear
Suggest the wealth of your talent
If only I could rest my head
Between your breast’s
Heaves of submission
And be reborn as beauty
Love, truth
And death in remission
You are an illustrated woman
Your flesh frames
Each picture you portray
So, I read you with a lascivious look
Devour your painted form
Like an open book
And then I look again
And imagine
That you have stamped
My library card of a heart
With a kiss of approval
But you are no more real
Than the love I feel
When I gaze at photographs
Of you
For you are young
And I am too old and ugly
To be loved by one
As beautiful as you
Fucked up
I wish that I could shut up
Should be in a lock up
Decay of mind and spirit
Not quite with it
I am the portal to insanity
For my mind is my only true reality
But my heart is almost free
So lay your head on my chest
And listen to the beat,
Beat, beat me
Into a pulp rhapsody
Of thoughts
Which broadcast from me
Like white noise from a turned off TV
Open your pocket
And place my heart within it
Like a time bomb of a watch
I shall tick against the skull of your belly
Until you tell me
That I have saved you
From sanity’s padded cell of luxury
And the concept of materiality
