Exhausted

[ray miller]

You stroked and caressed self-harm as a friend,
a shadow, a prop in a game of pretend.
How like you to buck an established trend
and exit the stage on a masculine end.

Exhausted to death by the Thought Gestapo,
you only desired to be Greta Garbo.
Acted with cowardice or bravado?
We'll talk of that on another bardo.

You likened the fall to a motorway crash,
a mangled wreckage strewn over the tracks.
I taught you to reconsider the facts.
Remember how you responded to that?

Weighing my words as stones from the scripture
you drew your face in a bigger picture.
I thought the smile was a permanent fixture.
When did the voices grow more than a whisper?

[Suzanne]

Hi!

This is interesting. The sounds are pleasant to the ear. I liked the "o" sounds.
It is a poem that would be interesting to hear the write read.
My favorite line is "you drew your face in a bigger picture".

Nice work,
Suzanne

[bodkin]

Hi,

There's some clever language in this and I enjoyed that, but I'm not getting any overall message from the poem, so I don't really know what it is about...

HTH

Ian

[juliadebeauvoir]

You stroked and caressed self-harm as a friend,
a shadow, a prop in a game of pretend.
How like you to buck an established trend
and exit the stage on a masculine end.

Ray, I read this several times out loud. It has a nice ryhthm about it. The first verse is very evident that the narrator is slightly disgusted with a self-absorbed friend.

Exhausted to death by the Thought Gestapo,
you only desired to be Greta Garbo.
Acted with cowardice or bravado?
We'll talk of that on another bardo.

I think this is a reference to the friend dabbling with thoughts of suicide. Am I right? Not sure what 'masculine end' refers to. In the next line you liken the person to Greta Garbo. So not sure if you are referring to a male or a female.

"

The Tibetan word Bardo means literally "intermediate state" - also translated as "transitional state" or "in-between state" or "liminal state".

I had to look bardo up. But its a clever rhyme with what preceded it.

Basically you have a lot going on in this poem. A set stage that features the thought police, Garbo (I vant to be alone...), limbo and a motorway crash that instantly brought pictures to mind of James Dean. I liked the use of 'motorway' because it seems very old fashion rather than to say 'car crash'.
The last verse needs just a little more information--it left me feeling like I needed a litte more.
Good read!
Kim

[BenJohnson]

I am also intriqued by this one, I had to struggle to shut out thoughts of David Bowie's Quicksand which was merely the ryhme of Bardo and Garbo in the same piece.

By the end of the second stanza I was such this was about a friend who has committed suicide. Someone who has played with self harm for so long that no one else believes they will do it. The Garbo line I could read either way, the person was desiring isolation like Garbo, or literally wanted to be female like Garbo, the second meaning for me has a stronger chime with the masculine end and the thought police.

The 'another bardo', reminded me of Bowie's 'next bardo' and again reinforced the idea of suicide that you would talk on later on another plain of existence. Again the reference to cowadice or bravado to me brings up the idea of suicide with people taking different stands judging the person action.

Having read the first two stanzas in this light I am thrown by the shift in the third stanza, is this now going back to previous conversations? or is this a conversation after an attempted suicide? or am I way off track? For me the third stanza is the hardest to read, but that may only be because I am on the wrong track from the first two.

Weighing my words as stones from the scripture

I love this line, there is so much compressed into there, the biblical idea of stoning sinners, the thoughts of judgement, the way the person is receiving your words.

The next line

you drew your face in a bigger picture.

reads nicely but doesn't really form anything concrete to me, especially following on from the former line.

The closing two lines do give me a sense of closure if the person has indeed commited suicide having given the impression that your conversations had made a different in thier outlook. For me they are only weakened by the vague meaning in the second line.

Over all though this reads nicely, I was unsure about the mixture of rhyme endings in the third stanza at first, but re-reading they seem to flow nicely. There is a lot in here to get the mind questioning and I like that.

[David]

Good gritty stuff, Ray. As usual, you handle the rhyme and the metre very confidently, although the rhyming gets a bit more wayward during S3.

Like Kim I wasn't sure what a masculine end was, and I'm completely lost by bardo.

The impression I got was that the person you're addressing - a patient - survived an attempted suicide.

Deep matters, handled with tact and respect.

Cheers

David

[ray miller]

Thanks all. It is a story based upon someone I did therapy with which had appeared to be very successful.She killed herself a year later.Why a masculine end? It's my experience that most people who self harm are female, whereas most people who commit suicide are male. Males are more likely to opt for swift, violent "irreversible" methods.That's my experience, anyway. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead a Bardo is a state of after-life. If I recall correctly there are many of them. I had Bowie's Quicksand in mind when I referred to it though I'd forgotten that Garbo was also in that song. "you drew your face in a bigger picture" - we did CBT Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which involves, amongst other things, examination and reconstruction of false, unrealistic or unhelpful habits of thinking. In a sense, seeing the big picture.

[dogofdiogenes]

You stroked and caressed self-harm as a friend,- this made me think of a cat more than a friend.
a shadow, a prop in a game of pretend- as for 'pretend', I think it's pretty real to the people who experience it!-professional standpoint there
How like you to buck an established trend
and exit the stage on a masculine end- didn't get this bit.

Exhausted to death by the Thought Gestapo,
you only desired to be Greta Garbo. -found this image a bit too romantic in the face of the pain so selfharmers go through
Acted with cowardice or bravado?
We'll talk of that on another bardo.

I was intrigued by the use of the word 'Gestapo', but for me this is a strong enough word without the 'Thought' bit-and it led me straight to thinking of 'Thought Police'

You likened the fall to a motorway crash,
a mangled wreckage strewn over the tracks.
I taught you to reconsider the facts.
Remember how you responded to that? I like the reflective bit in this last line-it's like a good 'turn'

Weighing my words as stones from the scripture
you drew your face in a bigger picture.
I thought the smile was a permanent fixture.
When did the voices grow more than a whisper?

The last stanza is my favourite. I got the most from the imagery here and I don't feel that it suffered as much from the weight of the rhyme, which didn't seem to work as successfully in the earlier stanzas. For me, the last line was the best image of something really expanding out of control and one that is accessible to people who may not have a working knowledge of some of the psychotic features of self harm. But I have really enjoyed seeing this. Thank you very much!

dogtired

[twoleftfeet]

Late to this one, Ray

I'm feeling proud of myself because (for once) I understood a poem's sticking points i.e in this case "Bardo" and
"masculine end"
I think that perhaps "macho" would be a more self-explanatory term than "masculine".

Plaudits for
Weighing my words as stones from the scripture

Geoff

[ray miller]

dogofdiogenes Fair point about the opening line -embraced would be better wouldn't it? When I refer to self-harm as a game of pretend I'm not intending to be judgemental. I see that for many people it is a means of relieving tension but also as a device for swerving the real thing - suicide. Hence the pretence. Am I making sense? The Thought Gestapo, rather than just Gestapo, was meant to refer to auditory hallucinations which, as the last line of the poem indicates, eventually won the day.I'm really pleased that you've taken something positive from it -enjoyed doesn't quite seem the appropriate word for the subject.

Geoff I agree that macho would be clearer than masculine but it doesn't seem to be the correct word "poetically", whatever I mean by that! Thanks for the plaudits.

[SalaamPoetic]

I have to admit that I couldn't put head to tail without reading through the comments (I was reading quite late at night... well, that's my excuse).

An accomplished write, and very sad. The last stanza is extremely haunting and beautifully written. Thanks.

[dogofdiogenes]

Hi Ray,

I don't think selfharm is about avoiding suicide, but about avoiding pain. You don't have to be mentally ill to do it, just acutely distressed. I'd rather be good at avoiding pain than life! End of lecture!!!!

drearydog