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WHO IS A CARER?          ARE YOU A CARER?         CARING ABOUT CARERS  

                         BRENDA WILLIAMS

 KILLINGBECK DRIVE and NAMELESS IN CAMDEN

                   KITH AND KIN (Sixties Press 2004) 

                                          CONTENTS 

BRENDA WILLIAMS

KILLINGBECK DRIVE

For Colm Golden, for saving me.

The poems had been laid aside and I

Chose to leave them behind, walking away,

My mind breaking under the strain, the cry

From within. There I stood in the midday

Glare, turning each way and back, the traffic

Roar magnifying pounding in my ear,

My senses recoiling in the panic

Silent in my throat, the end drawn and near.

I had pushed something from me yet without

Knowing why, a last instinct to be free

Forever of it all, while slowly out

Of the hollow depths of futility,

And abandoned mute imagination,

My reason for being alive had gone.

13th-14th June 2004

There is no way I can ease the pressure

Trapped in the depths and confines of my mind,

There where I exist beyond reach or cure

Searching for something lost I cannot find.

Nothing in experience can console,

My son is missing and cannot be found,

The night collides and veers out of control,

The day runs as mercury on the ground.

I am there with you in the high-walled yard

Where the tin-blue sky is a low ceiling,

Your face rests on the brick surface, your guard

Shields you from yourself, from the voice seething,

Urging you through the fire door that begins

The big bang for the residue of sins.

27th June 2003

My mother once worked in this hospital,

Now rearing as a low-levelled echo,

A torched ruin hidden and still formal

Beneath the listless mounting June shadow

Of half a century of forgotten

Leaf, rising green as once and verged between

The nearby cemetery wall, even

As I try to retrace your steps, a dream

Stalls subliminal in the shuttered drive

Where I am endlessly calling your name,

Trying to find out if you are alive,

In a race against time on hold again,

The circling horizon is closing in,

I am unable to end or begin.

27th – 28th June 2003

Cyril lies in his own cemetery

Buried for ever next to my mother

In mockery of how it used to be,

Helpless before them, left to remember

And stunned by the sudden recollection

Of it all, I turn and turn about, mute

And without anything to fall back on,

Experience that I cannot refute

Seeps imperceptibly through the wasted

Years paralysing everything I try

To do. Round me, from a far time gathered,

I thread a circle from which to defy,

An unbroken line on which to rely,

Pushing horizon through a needle’s eye.

                                                            28th June 2003

And legend has it that the beck ran red

With blood during the Wars of the Roses,

The king’s armies faced each other gathered

On Killingbeck Field, wild wheat opposes

Now the chain installations of Walmart

And Comet and the drive-in Burger King,

The fields of home effaced and torn apart,

Their familiarity a ruin,

The granite wall we balanced on has gone,

Once, I inched my way along its surface

Edging towards the utmost reach of stone,

Unable to turn around or retrace

My journey, yet paralysed at the rim

Of something levelling pulling me in.

28th June-5th July 2003

How often I am reminded to pull

Myself together, or casually

Told the relapse will improve, yet full

Of foreboding I know nothing can be

Salvaged but a new unalterable

Reality, the far-flung ensuing

Derailment of time, ineffaceable,

In a mirror’s endless self-reflecting.

Nothing works and the past is left to stall,

To peter out in the end as I hold

The impossibility of it all,

While memory collapses, fold on fold.

Set on autopilot right to the end,

A flight-path nothing can apprehend.

                                                            5th-9th July 2003

Most of the time you hardly know I’m there,

Laughing quietly to yourself, you do

Not need to communicate from somewhere

So out of bounds to the rest of us, you

Talk to God in an imponderable

Language of your own making where long

Lost echoes are incommunicable

Even while you listen, words that belong

To you alone, threading their threnody

By night and day for the slow redemption

Of the damned and the altered history

Of a world heading towards collision.

I hover at your narrative’s margin,

Everything I have known is wearing thin.

                                                            9th July 2003

I stand in the supermarket trying

To weigh your needs in the time left, before

Returning to the ward routine, crying

From the depths of an unconscious world, for

Your mind’s ruin. The bedraggled language

Hardly anyone now can understand,

A monologue nothing can yet assuage,

The tardy eschatology just fanned

Out like a mushroom from the livid day,

The manifest apparitions of night,

The voice of God that will not go away,

The past tense that can never be put right.

The co-ordinates of my life meet in

The Sanatorium’s summer ruin.

9th July 2003

And today is an anniversary,

It is the day of your grandfather’s death,

There, in the traffic flow on the Selby

Road, he struggled in vain for his last breath.

Back then I cared whether he lived or died,

Not knowing who my father was at all,

And twenty years passed me by as I tried

To unravel the unanswerable,

While I tried to pull myself together

And to give a voice to an unasked why.

My father’s illness, before and after

My mother’s death, was left there to deny,

Half your life so far, and slowly each year

For fifteen years I watched you disappear.

                                                            9th July 2003

You cannot see beyond here and now, lost

In a world from which there is no exit,

Locked without end in a cat’s cradle crossed,

Far beyond thought where words don’t seem to fit

Into their experience any more.

They appear at random a makeshift crew

Left without any echo from before,

In motley adorned outlandish and new,

A syntax left to reap, with the hallmark

Of unreality stamped through and through,

A passport to a country where the arc

Of horizon is always out of view,

Where language exists in combat without

Leave, trapped in the stronghold of fears’ redoubt.

14th July 2003

Now we encounter the different hell

Of remission for a while, you wander

At your will for an interval, a shell

Empty of who you were, with no after

Echo to remind us of the time still

Left behind, left in its own vacuum

To resonate without meaning until

Some answer can be found. The afternoon

Presses down and there is nowhere to go

With the weight, the endless precipitate

Days veering, stalling with their domino

Effect, on a future that will not wait,

Its void seers nearing in the July sun,

My mind has nothing left to lean upon.

16th July 2003

How shall I gather these unquiet days

In order to thread them on their own string,

Words I never thought to hear, in a maze

Amassing and beyond imagining.

I tremble at the breakdown of language

When association has gone too far,

The false turning that nothing can assuage,

The total loss of the familiar,

The siren wail in the labyrinthine

Passage just drawing you towards your fate,

The random erosion of what was mine

And the intervention that comes too late.

The closed chambers of schizophrenia

Locked internecine in amnesia.

16th July 2003

Even the address of the Asda chain

Store still has the name of Killingbeck Drive,

And the day is dislocated again,

Reaching back to the time you were alive.

Now it is the semblance of a terrain

Of wheat and still poppy, deliberate,

Rearing suddenly in between, in vain,

Verging among buildings as though innate,

An inerradicable memory

Precipitate as an endless summer,

Or how it used to be. Infinity

Left to stand, to reap forever after

And abandoned under tarmac, ruin

Blurring on an oscillating drive-in.

17th-21st July 2003

What would you have made of this world if you

Had lived, these fields once so familiar,

The long shadows of the drive you walked through

In the Sixties are now beyond repair,

Only the blond abandon of the last

Field left to stand reminds me you were there.

As though to resurrect you I hold fast

To the corn’s far ebb-tide as I compare

This high summer day to everything known,

And with nothing to salvage but a dream

Where you just went on living on your own,

Your death a reality that had been

Superimposed on a world turned upside

Down, a world that you simply laid aside.

30th July 2003

A poem cannot be made to happen,

Language comes always of its own accord,

At its own cost, the spirit is often

At a premium I can ill-afford

As I wait and then languish with the line

Going nowhere and ground to a standstill,

With nothing to fall back on to define

Mute early echoes left unreachable

And inaudible. Imagination

Is an island that existed before

Its toll, its route is via depression

Leaving me behind with nothing to draw

From the lasting untold pressure of time,

Now hurrying away with what is mine.

5th-6th August 2003

There exists no word in the language for

Parents who have lost their children, childless

Is not a fit description any more

Than children there and not there, the endless,

The relentless absence of their presence,

Whether it be death or mental illness

Or days and nights just left as they were once,

Its aftermath is left to coalesce.

An emptiness that will not go away,

A shadow that falls for ever alone

Without direction, or even the day

To cling to, petrifying as the stone

It leans upon, without any way out

Of existence fragmenting round about.

19th August 2003

There are no words for the leftover state,

The lockout when children have grown and gone,

There is only the time in which to wait

For those once known who can still abandon

Each other without ever a look back.

Without any knowledge of the impact

They leave behind, with the colossal lack

Of the familiar lodged as a fact

Of existence, shifting, rearranging

Its ground with nothing new to hold on to,

An echo always coming to nothing,

Lingering in vain trying to get through,

And awake in dreams I am left to search,

The end and the origin out of reach.

20th August 2003

Without anything left to live for I

Rose up calmly and suddenly and closed

The door behind me, free at last from my

Own past, now wide open and unenclosed,

And converging exposed on the future.

I have lived my life as though inside out,

Aware only of incongruity,

While endlessly encompassed all about

By inexorable disparity.

Unnumbered years have become a pressure,

An involuntary surrendering,

A building slowly crumbling from within,

Long since abandoned under scaffolding,

With the memory of its origin.

10th-12th September 2003

Suddenly from somewhere in the nowhere

Of my mind, the lost irretrievable

Years erupt, short-lived, unloosened from their

Holding as shadows unredeemable,

Effaced now from the light of their own day,

Remembered in passing in falling rain,

The light as darkness on the surface lay,

Night echoes refusing to go away.

They linger for a moment once again,

A fading water-mark, their disarray

A reality left residual,

Layering softly through and through after

And before, avowing their survival,

A mendicant language that will not scare.

24th-26th September 2003

I heave a burden that is too heavy

For my soul yet compelled endlessly, here

And there, with the impossibility

Of it all. Alone and with the end near

Enough to lend a hand I cannot be

Any different, accustomed I breathe

An airless sheer atmosphere where only

The day on hold can say what I can leave

Behind. All around me night’s disarray

Gathers head, I am lost in a landscape

Of my own making and the time that lay

Before me has gone, there is no escape

From dreams as a miasma closes in,

Encircling me with silence fast within.

26th-27th September 2003

 I stand before the distance, the outside

Of a fairground as a child looking in,

The world unfolds before me, open wide

And beckoning, and I cannot go in.

My destiny was close to the white wall

And I never moved out of its shadow

Flickering with inextinguishable

Colours projected on the far echo

Of sprawling factory neon, switching

Off and on, Fifties letters in high night

Rain etching their aftermath, igniting

The low industrial glow from the light

Of a bus terminus on the far side,

Shadows on a wall with nowhere to hide.

27th September 2003

Nothing remains now of the person I

Knew, standing at the margin always, whirled

To the edge of things, just a sudden cry

Breaking across the span of a lost world

Is all I can hear as I try to sound

A stranger nearby, taking up abode

Without consent within me, and new-found

As ‘the man of the sea’. Under his load

I stumble, no longer aware of who

Or what I am, while a tardy future

Abandons whatever it was I knew,

Leaving me to fend as though beyond cure.

Imagination has taken its toll,

The year’s a tangled weft beyond control.

16th January 2004

My spirit breaks under the coming year,

It vacillates before each unknown hour,

Endlessly they reach, encompassed and sheer,

Terminal to the edge where I cower.

A single moment is sometimes more than

I can bear and I am paralysed by

The weight of the light, its lowering span

The empty rust-coloured air, as I try

To make a meaning from everything known.

The up-ended leftover disarray,

Where night is no more than a shadow thrown

From the mute illusory unlit day,

The stifled landscape of an early cry,

The co-ordinates of a life awry.

                                                            20th January 2004

The Drive was the only way out each night

And yet journeying home the next morning

You must have sometimes wondered, catching sight

Of your children there, about everything

That might have been, the closest that you came

To Nature and your country left behind,

The village you would never see again,

In scaffolding at the core of your mind.

The granite wall still enclosing after

And before, stands now, indestructible,

You would have passed my father working there,

Where it verged almost on the hospital,

Its inexorable reality

The corner stone of the cemetery.

16th June 2004

The ruins of Killingbeck have been sold

Off, ‘No Entry’ hoardings are fixed in place,

In dreams the entrance to another world

Is sealed up now, yet horizon’s first trace

Will survive intact in my memory.

The cure for TB was discovered here,

So the hospital’s open balcony

Is safe from the bulldozer drawing near,

Destined just to stand in the urban sprawl

A random reminder, its history

Left to span real estate and shopping mall,

But nothing will remain of these early

Thirties’ buildings, the sanatorium

The refuge for your youth and its ruin.

19th-20th June 2004

Only here is it possible to stand

Still with space enough just to turn around,

To follow again the lay of the land,

An echo ebbing on the reach of sound.

Rising from it all ‘The Melbourne Clock’ seen

Now as in the Sixties, as you would see

It then, the hours overdrawn that had been

Entailed and left outstanding, already

Long overdue, within the four-fold face,

Curtailed and left before you, were your own

Last days, a countdown nothing could erase,

While you pawned the time that was left on loan.

Its edifice sustains a single tree

Struggling upward beneath surface ivy.

                                                            20th -21st June 2004

I know of no validity outside

Poetry and the frontiers keep on

Changing, ever shifting, an exposed wide

Distance never reaching its horizon.

Seacroft, that endlessly encircles me,

Enclosed forever within those narrow

Confines, rising now like a slate-grey sea,

Where the whitened shadows of history

Are blown across its surface like a low

Summer wind, evaporating slowly

Over window glass into the empty

Air, from a forgotten ordinary

Day folded in the hold of memory,

In the hollow depths of vacuity.

3rd-4th July 2004

How is it possible, how shall I be

Able to say what the hidden words meant

Then, resonating in extremity

Always, unlike time that was only lent

For a little longer. It was too late,

It was always too late, the stifled years

Were somehow put on hold and left to wait

And innate with the sum of all my fears.

How much I have missed you, never having

Known you through every unfolding season

Since then, when you suddenly went leaving

Me with only anger as my reason.

The pain since then, and years do not abate

Your quiet fate, it was always too late.

                                                            22nd June-5th July 2004

Silently I wait in the triangle

That still spans the outward rim of York Road,

The fields of the adjacent hospital

Once a sanatorium, in the mode

Of an open ruin. Random echoes

And their stories lay now in the fallen

Corridors as they ricochet through those

First days like down turned abandoned leaves when

They close or hold the seared summer shadows

Of the light. Killingbeck Cemetery

Folds its layered history as it throws

Its mantle on my son left behind me,

Each time I leave him lost in his knowledge,

And waving now as once from his college.

6th July 2004

Through sixteen months as ‘one of the damned’ you

Are back in Intensive Care, ‘The Middle

Man of Christianity’ as you knew

You were all along. Yet the hospital

Is a disguise for the torture chamber,

Somewhere you can be poisoned on a whim,

There is nowhere to go beyond after

And before, you reside now at the rim

Of impermanent unreality

In a region still unknown to us all.

I have missed your familiarity

Unsilent since your life began to stall

Beyond understanding, I search among

The hours for a peace that will never come.

6th July 2004

And for forty years I have been in thrall

Subjugated to memory without

Knowing anything of myself at all,

Left to nurse a colossal absence out

Of the depths of which there was no escape.

While I walked through the shallows of my own

Life, my momentum halting at its gape,

Sometimes stalling refusing to give way

As though my shadow was only on loan,

A passing moment of the utmost day.

Darker than darkness in a mirror seen

Was the cursive script of what the words mean,

This world was a preliminary scene

For its final rehearsal in a dream.

5th-6th July 2004

It curves silently backwards, endlessly

Replicated, a mirror turned upon

Itself, reflecting an entrance only

Time can understand in its summation

In a dream, wheat clings to the beginning

Of Killingbeck Drive, high and white and out

Of control, melting into rain falling

Suddenly through July, and all about

Me an airless encompassing future

Presses into being, rearranging its load,

Horizon darkens under the pressure

Of a near sky, here there is no abode,

No refuge to rest in, my life stalling

At the entrance unable to go in.

28th July 2003

BRENDA WILLIAMS

NAMELESS IN CAMDEN

They come to me like wraiths out of the mist

Lost insignificant the dispossessed

Searching for their shadow mislaid or missed

Effaced from the day, they linger oppressed

Without end with the knowledge of someone

Since forgotten that will not go away,

They pass with only their own reflection

For consolation outstaring the day

The outlandish night left there endlessly

Merging as an early oblivion

And into everything they cannot see.

And sometimes in dreams in low light unshone,

From echoes remembered something is heard

Yet recurring mnemonic and conferred.

31 October–6 November 2003

They trace the heel of the day forever

In front with something of a life straight from

The heart as they react between after

And before, held in its arc as they come

And go with a truth that has come apart

And a name’s echo they cannot go back

To, a future that refuses to start,

That stalling lies abandoned in its track.

The last light of a day is all there is

Left, the sudden footsteps falling away

Throbbing endlessly through the arteries

Of a life on hold with nowhere to lay

Its head, hollowing out a centrifuge

An open dark without any refuge.

7-12 November 2003

One Carer’s Story - Barry Tebb       Schizophrenia - A Carer’s Journal - Mike

     Schizophrenia – A Mother’s Story – Georgina Wakefield                         My Journey Of Sadness – Stan Hagon

                                       The Voice Of Carers – Amanda Cummin           Yemeni Carers’ Stories – Debjani Chaterjee

   Beyond Our Reach, But Not Our Love – Brian D’arcy                        Carry On Caring – Emily Machin & Lucy Machin

     Enigma And Other Poems - Georgina Wakefield                        Killingbeck Drive – Brenda Williams

      Searching The Beyond And Other Poems – Daisy Abey     Sharp Edge – Daisy Abey     The Long Good Bye – Barry Tebb

      Looking Back – Barry Tebb     Nameless In Camden – Brenda Williams      Autobiography – Simon Jenner      

The Sick Image Of My Father Fades – John Horder      Are You A Carer?      Caring About Carers