HRL

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.

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Writers' Award in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023. His debut collection Volatile is forthcoming with the 87 press. 

Tom said the following about his poem:

Down in Buxton the weather was fine, yet ascending Axe Edge Moor, fog expanded, and I could barely see beyond my arm – I could barely see my partner. Birds took this opportunity of atmospheric shelter to traverse the moor; I could only apprehend their contours. We heard a golden plover but could not see it, I stood under the shadow of a curlew, its sickle beak lanced ghostlike through me. I was so enamoured by the fog’s glamour that, to quote Peter Gizzi, I felt like ‘an incident trapped in thick description’. I had lost my body and became an incident of language.