The Thoughts E-Book

Sarah Barnsley

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 47

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

An assured and inventive debut, The Thoughts explores different manifestations of intrusive thoughts as part of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) before navigating through the twists and turns of recovery and love. These poems inhabit therapists' treatment rooms, waiting rooms, and everyday documents, appearing in such varied forms as emails, research proposals and kids' puzzles. Compassionate and at times painfully humorous, The Thoughts is an act of advocacy, giving voice to critically underrepresented experiences of illness through poems that are as peculiar and creative as they are arresting.

Leseprobe

The Thoughts

Published 2022 by The Poetry Business

Campo House,

54 Campo Lane,

Sheffield S1 2EG

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Copyright © Sarah Barnsley 2022

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-914914-02-7

eBook ISBN 978-1-914914-03-4

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Designed & typeset by The Poetry Business.

Printed by Imprint Digital.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Smith|Doorstop is a member of Inpress

www.inpressbooks.co.uk.

Distributed by IPS UK, 1 Deltic Avenue,

Rooksley, Milton Keynes MK13 8LD.

The Poetry Business gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

– Emily Dickinson, poem 341

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain […] there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height […] And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the more impetuously approach it.

– Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’

Contents

Ruminations

Body Found in Garden After Confession

This Horse

Tainted Ode

The Fugitive

Does This Mean I’m a Steps Fan?

The day my brain broke

Compulsions

I come through the door like pest control

Private and Confidential

Drafts

I agree to read all the terms and conditions

Poem on Checks

Pure O

Avoidances

Contemporary Policemen in Their Homes

Section 3: Details of Project

Day two of sick leave

Safety-seeking Behaviours

Discuss the Past Twelve Years with Reference to One US Soap Opera

The Outsider

Magical Thinking

Virginia Woolf Has Fallen Over

My Stay in That Hotel Was Just Out of a Magazine

System Administrator

After being unable to tell the Samaritans

PhD Viva

Today You Went to Lunch with a Cave

Thought-Action-Fusion

Fear Brain

Prefrontal Cortex

Think of it in Terms of Geometry

The Other Side of the Quarter Panel Mirror

HELP WALLY!

Newly in love, distracted neuroscientists

Formulation

I Prefer to Get My Information from Unreliable Sources

We Have Made a Number of Key Appointments

Theory A, Theory B

The next poem

The Thoughts

My Illness as a Collection of Ladders

Thoughts are not facts

Treatment

2/17

3/17

5/17

7/17

9/17

11/17

13/17

16/17

17/17

Epilogue

Imaginal Exposure Story

Examples

White Bears and Pink Elephants

Notes

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

For Louise, whose name means Hero

Ruminations

Body Found in Garden After Confession

How the body got there,

or whose it was, nobody knew,

not even the confessor,

who had been resident all their life in Brazil,

who was on holiday in the Bahamas at the time,

experts suggest, that the body entered the earth,

who was on life support after a diving accident

at the point, experts say, that the body’s owner died

and we are pleased to bring this case to its conclusion

said the Chief Superintendent

and the nation can feel safe again

said the Prime Minister

and we pray for all the families

said the Archbishop of Canterbury

and the confessor said goodbye to the house, the dog,

took off their shoes, clothes and wedding band,

went out into the garden and

lay as still as a forgotten rake in tall grass.

This Horse

There’s this horse

that can’t eat apples.

It’s not that the horse

doesn’t like apples

or that its castle of teeth

can’t crush them

or that its leather-satchel tongue

can’t collect the bits

or that its upturned welly of a throat

can’t tramp down the chunks –

it’s that one day,

as it drew up an apple

of no distinction,

the horse had a thought:

What if I choke on this?

And the more the horse tried

to swat the thought away,

the more the apple grew,

and the more the thought grew

until the horse felt it had Jupiter

and all its moons in its mouth

and it couldn’t breathe

and it was gagging

and its owner tried to reason with it,

but the horse wouldn’t be told

and over the course of a year

the horse visited the vet

every Wednesday at 12

and the vet advised the horse

to try an exercise where the horse

had to choose a small globe

from a bagged assortment

and hold each one in its mouth

in a series of graded steps:

a robin’s egg for one minute,

a beetroot for two,

a cannonball for three;

and the horse had to

commit to the process

and tolerate the discomfort

and by all means note down

its thoughts and feelings

but not respond to them

and none of this worked

and the only thing for the horse

to do was to eat oats and practise

radical acceptance

of apples as something eaten

by other horses

in another place and time

as if all the apples in the world

were locked behind

glass cabinets

in a museum

with all the other things