I’ve done the heart

I’ve done the fist

What will I speak through next,

this poet-cum-ventriloquist?

 

It just sort of crept up on me

My bus ride to the station

Me buying of a flat white

Me fancying a man on the platform

All the people going about their business

It all seemed very normal

 

I had no reason to fight it

because I didn’t know that it was there

Until I started having this feeling

and so, I butchered its body

Into pieces but, as a whole, remains intact

I just don't know what it is yet

 

It just sort of crept up on me

I’ve lost what I never knew I had

I didn’t know its shape, weight, size, or volume

All I knew was that it changed the way

I understood and still do now

everything in the world around me

 

 

I feel like I’m a taxidermy version of myself

 

I’m only now just learning to allow

Just allowing it to be,

stop trying to intellectualise it

stop trying to find an answer,

Or try to make rational sense of it

Futile

It must make sense,

everything and nothing makes sense

I hold myself to this standard

I regard myself a logical human being,

which I know is a contradiction

in and of itself

Humans are not logical

We are emotional

So why am I trying to figure this out

when it is impossible, is unexplainable?

There is no reason, understanding,

or rationalisation

 

I still cannot find the language for this feeling,

Or I don't want to

There's nothing that neatly puts it into a term

If I say such and such a word, people go,

‘I know what that means’

It's like just looking around to have something

which you cannot put into language

It’s one of the things that we just can't articulate.

However much language

we have for these feelings,

you cannot articulate it in a tone

It's beyond, it's way beyond

You can't intellectualise it, nor can it be articulated

Comparable to the omnipresence of an impending doom,

to my taxidermiphobia  

 

When I was a little lad, maybe 55 r 5 my cat Toby was run over by a no 155 bus on Balham High Road not far from where I stayed with my Nana and Grandad at the time. The bus stopped and my Grandad picked up the dead cat and told me he would put him in a little wooden box and bury him in his garden. We had a farewell ceremony. I remember having ice cream and jelly and wearing my A-Team t-shirt. But Grandad had lied. Toby was not in the box. I was sad for a few weeks and didn’t want to get another cat because Toby was my friend, and he was irreplaceable. Then one day, Grandad said to me ‘Lee. You don’t need to be sad. You’re going to see Toby again’. ‘Grandad’, I said, ‘Are we going in an aeroplane, and I look out of the window and there is Toby sitting on a cloud?’ ‘No’, said Grandad. That morning, he took me to the local Horniman Museum in Dulwich. And there was Toby standing up wearing a black tuxedo with a white shirt, and black tie, along with cufflinks, a pink carnation in his left pocket, and shoes that complemented his attire. Toby was one of 16 cats including one in a wedding dress as part of a cat’s wedding display. The cats were not only taxidermied they were also singing together as a choir.  See, these were audio animatronic taxidermied cats with their mouths moving up and down to sing non-stop all day long the song All Things Bright and Beautiful.Can you imagine what that did to a 5-year-old me seeing my friend Toby standing up in a wedding suit and singing a hymn?  It was quite simply the most horrific thing I had ever seen. And I am sure that the best man was my friend Woody’s cat Felix because Felix had a black mark on his face that I had never seen before on any other cat. I wouldn’t be surprised. What made it even more surreal, and terrifying, was that Toby’s eyes were not his eyes, must have been fake ones, put in the wrong way because Toby was cross-eyed.

 

‘Shock, the fertile mother of phobias, a phobia is a suppressed fear displaced onto an external object, both an expression of anxiety and a defence against it. Fleeing from an internal danger is a difficult enterprise’

so wrote Sigmund Freud in1909

 

Recently, I discovered that my friend likes stuffed animals. So, I went to the Horniman as I knew the shop sold postcards with images of stuffed animals. I went to the counter and asked the lady to tell me their selection.  ‘Choose one for me’ I said, ‘but I can’t see it’. She chose a postcard from the taxidermy range and put it in a small paper bag. I paid for it and left having no idea what I had just bought. I wanted to write a message to him on the blank side of the postcard and this meant having to look what was on the front. Squinting, I clocked two stuffed red squirrels out of the corner of my left eye, quickly turned that side over and wrote my message of affection and put the card in an envelope. I would not be present when he undid the envelope for fear of seeing those squirrels again.

 

Often, I have a recurring dream

I express this inarticulable feeling that I often have

in a sound. The idea in song,

but it isn’t that at all. It is just sounding

***SCREAM***

Guttural, loud, long

And that feels brilliant to express it fully

without the restrictions of language

Letting go of any resistance

any ideas of how I should behave

Any ideas of how others would react to that

Letting my body express

Allowing myself

A beautiful thing

Watching myself scream

Stops any ideas

of other people’s opinions

Screaming in front of a mirror to see myself as a person

I hold myself at higher standards than I do others

Thoughts in my head, very self-critical

Speaking those thoughts out loud

I am not as critical; I am vocalising it

I am talking to another person

My reflection in the mirror

I would never be that cruel to another person

When I look in the mirror,

I treat myself like a person

as opposed to me,

I treat myself with the respect,

the love, the compassion

that I deserve as a human being

 

As part of the dream, Toby is there with me, although still taxidermied and with a moving motorised up and down mouthpiece, Toby, after listening to my scream, says ‘WOW!’, ‘I feel like I've learned so much of your story Lee, now you are no longer a little boy. There were no words at all. But I felt it all, I know it and not all of it. I know there's so much more, but so much depth was portrayed in that scream. And yeah, it felt open without language.’

 

I get out of bed this morning

after having that recurring dream again

Barefooted onto a carpet made of pins

with their blades pointing upwards

The slow release of blood from my pin pricked feet,

like performance artist Franko B did on canvas years ago, 

bloodstain this world turned upside down around me

Then I just go about my day

Make a cup of tea

 I’m at Tesco’s, I'm buying lettuce

‘Oh yeah’ A penny can drop very quickly

That feeling comes over me again

But whereas Franko had a captive audience,

there is no one watching me,

just people on the bus to the station

people buying flat whites

men being fancied on the platform  

people going about their business

And to them, things all seem very normal.