Real Love
Another poem of mine - written in 2020, and selected to be read at an online Booker Prize event in Doncaster, by writers Fiona Mozley and Lemn Sissay. The spacing isn't showing how I want, but we move
Tom is your boyfriend
Sometimes your lover
Tom is a gardener
He is also fighting
England's enemies
He came to visit you,
Via his helicopter
And landed in the garden
You are going to marry him
You tell me that both of you
Are in love
It must be real love
Because you jumped out the
Upstairs window; like all great lovers
To escape, the people who deny
Your love.
You tell me that Tom lives
In the attic
And at night, together, you make love;
Now, you are pregnant
I live in the attic
And I never meet Tom
I have to tell you that
He isn't real
Your love isn't real
Your self isn't real
"Psychosis and the specific diagnosis of schizophrenia represent a major psychiatric disorder, in which a person's perception, thoughts, mood and behaviour are significantly altered. The symptoms of psychosis and schizophrenia are usually divided into 'positive symptoms' including hallucinations, and delusions, and negative symptoms (such as emotional apathy, lack of drive, poverty of speech, social withdrawal and self-neglect)."
But you are 80, and in love;
To live 25 years
Cut
Off
And still,
To believe in love.
I am 25 and don't believe in love
I've never felt love for any man,
I've fucked, or let, fuck me
And don't want love
"What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action or experience."
You tell me that as a girl
With your sister, you climbed
A tree
And jumped
Because you, were the bravest.
Quotes:
Number 1 - from the NICE guidelines on treating schizophrenia.
Number 2 – words by R.D Laing, a controversial and radical psychiatrist who specialised in schizophrenia.