HLR

ON CRISIS

— after ‘Memoir (after Miyó Vestrini)’ by Sean Bonney

I would phone the crisis line again, explain, “I am as dying as a daisy chain.
My body is an erasure poem, chunks of me are disappearing under someone

else’s pen. I am Karen O’s tears in the ‘Maps’ video. I’m currently being strangled
by a barbed-wire rosary. I cannot subsist on this tattered mouthful of cumulonimbus

I’ve been chewing on for two decades. I am obsessing over the etymology of ‘obsess’.
Beauty is terror → Terror is tremors → Tremors are beaut— I disagree. I’m sobbing

because I realised psychosis can’t be glamourised. I just upended a glass of red wine
on a white dog. The moths are busy bleeding all over the ceiling. If you cover something,

that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. All loves are eventual funerals. I am unconvincingly trying
to reframe my loneliness as ‘voluntary solitude’. I am distraught about failing to win

writing competitions I didn’t enter. In the back of notebook #53, I have the recipe
for a failsafe speedball OD & I know where to get the ingredients. I am speaking

like a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance. In the freezer, paracetamol
is breaking up with codeine. I am a storm in a C-cup. My eyes have been mandolined.

Yesterday I was sitting in a Camden gutter, paralytic, facetiming Mary Magdalene & gravity
coaxed the phone from my grip into the smothering abyss of the storm drain & we both felt

freer — her, immediately; me, terribly. His death rattle is reverberating in my ribcage.
I am haemorrhaging police sirens. My exhaustion is exhausted. The sunflowers refuse to

look at me. I am pepper in a saltshaker, I am trapped in parentheses, I am shedding
my antlers & my skin is peeling off like a fucking banana. I am afraid of my fear.”

Phlegmatically, the crisis team volunteer would suggest “toast, tea & a bath.”
I would hear “toaster in a bath.” But I do not have a toaster. Or a microwave.

Or a television. I’ve never owned such tech & everyone is upset with me for this,
they “honestly don’t know how [I] live”, though I think Sean would rate this Luddism.

Still, I would oblige. Cop a toaster from Argos. & an extension lead. Then I would tip
an entire box of chamomile tea leaves into scalding bathwater, stir it with a big stick

like a sick witch brewing magic. I would chuck in the psych report which reads: Patient
obviously highly intelligent. Easily charms staff + other patients. Treatment resistant

depression, anxiety, personality disorder, psychosis. Chronic absconder. Addict.
Difficult to manage. Suicidal. Successful poet., let this summary of me crackle

with my frazzled hair & skin, turn to blistered cinder. Or I would lie,
lie in the empty bathtub, not thinking about you at all.

HLR (she/her) is a prize-winning working-class poet from North London. She is the author of History of Present Complaint (First Cut) and EX-CETERA (Nine Pens). HLR was commended in the National Poetry Competition and Free Verse Prize, won the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition, and was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, Bridport Prize and Cheltenham Prize. Recent work has been published by The Poetry Society, The London Magazine and PERVERSE.

HLR said the following about his poem:

'On crisis' is part of a very long series of poems that I am collectively calling "a living autopsy", a poetic dissection I'm performing on my self to explore how mental illness manifests corporeally and tangibly, rather than just invisibly. All of the poems in the series include quoted snippets of my real psychiatric reports and I use these as starting points. This was initially a prose poem, but I broke it up into couplets to create a clearer rhythm, thinking that the many images and frantic, desperate energy would be too overwhelming and breathless if read as one dense block.