despair – Page 2 – Hues of Hankinson

June already….

This is my first post in quite a few weeks. It was a glorious May, the weather was sunny and bright and the fields, shrubs and trees blossomed. For me though, I needed to conserve energy, close in and give myself room to breathe.

It was a time of despair, frustration, discord, reassessment, consolidation and repair. It took time and it took silence. Time to listen to the sounds and focus on the real things and let go of the white noise and the humdrum and the background churnings that distract and destroy.

I continually ask myself what it is that is important- to me, to others, to our world. I am not sure I have the answers, I am not sure they are the right questions, I just know that the disillusionment of the last year sapped my energy greatly and I must remember not to let myself get sucked in again by its draining darkness. I can still believe in what seems right to me, it is not for others to decide by either their actions or inactions, I still get to choose what I feel, how I greet each day, how I process the events that happen to me and around me. This helps me get up and reach for a new day, a new dream a new horizon. I am not broken, just bruised and a little misshapen and the bruises will heal in time.

Carpe diem- seize the day. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

©Alison Jean Hankinson

Voices of Whittingham….Past lives in an Asylum.

This is again for mental health awareness week. I spent some time today at the archives in Preston. I am currently participating in a local history/arts/creative writing/mental health project. It is based around the Whittingham Asylum at Preston and it aims to give a voice to the lives and stories that played out there. It was a very large Asylum and Preston was very proud of it, there were about 500 staff and often as many as 3000 inpatients.

Whittingham Lives Project.

I have learned a lot in such a few sessions and certainly had some of my own assumptions challenged. The Asylum opened in 1873 and had patients sent there from all over the north-west of England, many of the other Asylums, workhouses, almshouses were already bursting at the seams. It was regarded as a model Asylum and postcards of its external facade were sold as memorabilia. There were extensive gardens where fruit and vegetables were grown and it even had its own orchestra. Underneath this facade still lurked the very real horrors of Victorian poverty and the mental health of a scarred nation. End-stage syphilis was one of the significant causes of the mental and psychotic decline that resulted in many people spending their end of days in the Asylum and in the period of World War 1, both shell-shock and a form of hydrocephalus resulting from the Spanish flu were responsible for increased demand for spaces and places within the Asylum. The superintendent’s journal from 1873-95 was stark to begin with detailing the very worst events including the frequent dismissals of staff for what can only be described as physical abuse of the inpatients and the frequent outbreaks of scarlatina, diarrhoea and typhoid, whilst rules and regulations resulted in greater detail in later entries, including the deaths from misadventure, poor health and at their own hand.

The Asylum had its own cemetery. People came and went though, it wasn’t always the end of the road and when the photographer that came to capture the newly admitted, those well enough would ask to have images taken to show they were well and recovered to send to their loved ones with the plea to come and take them away.

Today we were considering restraint, emotional, physical and chemical.

I wrote this for Charlotte.

In Chains

Into the light, beyond the bands that bind me tight,

Into the dawn, beneath the hands that hold me down,

Into the sunlight, the stench of starch and sulphur stings my eyes

Into the madness, my muddled mind festers in fetid fettered manacles.

Deliver me.

Just a moment…

Each moment is distinct

it may or may not relate to the preceding moment

it may or may not be followed by a moment of equal or even greater magnitude

it is what it is- a moment.

It will pass

It will be superseded

It will be vanquished, resurrected, redefined, it will shine redolent as the star in its own story

And then be gone….to make way for the next moment.

Always remember this.

It is but a moment.

unremarkable yet remarkable

It will pass.

I first published this in 2018 for Mental health Awareness week, but have made some small edits. It was World Suicide Prevention Day on Sunday 10th September. Suicide has a profound impact on all whom are touched by it, and I certainly don’t have any answers, but I know in my heart of hearts that what looks just so in one moment, can look entirely different in the next moment.

I think this is what I was trying to capture.

This is for Open Link Night at d’Verse.

The day we fell….

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,

We remember them each and everyone, every year, it is our duty

We solemnly speak their names, we treasure their memories in our hallowed halls

We honour their fate on memorials and museum walls.

Kick back, flashlight, night flare

We are back there

I do solemnly swear to bring honour and bear witness

To my country but he is missing in action.

tap tap….clack clack…. frack frack

I scour the wall of missing people.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

First line taken from For the Fallen- by Laurence Binyon. Last line taken from “Leaving time” Jodi Picoult. For Bridging the Gap at d’Verse.

Listing

Sometimes I just want to shout man overboard

I wonder if they notice me drowning in my sea of despair

The waves washing over me eroding my will to rise above the tide

of hopelessness.

Sometimes I just want to shout man overboard

It as if I have been listing too long

I can’t hold on anymore and I am driftwood at sea

Destined to become seaweed and seashells for beachcombers in the longshore drift.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

It was a man overboard kind of week. This is for Napowrimo18. Day 27. Fragile.

This toxic environment…(selfishness)

What is wrong with you people-

That you stand and stare and revel in the mistakes of others?

What is wrong with you people-

That your putrid pleasure comes from the pain and suffering of another person?

What happened to make this a fetid fertile pit of futility

With despair and desperation dribbling down the sides of our decadent lives

Our dreams crumble and turn to dust, mere ashes of former aspirations.

Why can’t we forgive and forget and rebuild and restate

And redress the balance.

This toxic environment-

These wasted moments

These lonely voices

These damaged hearts.

I tell thee look up before it is too late.

Day 21 Napowrimo2018– Enough said. The theme was narcissism.-

Three minutes to midnight-1984 revisited.

In 1984 at BRGS I was the editor of our School magazine “Squirrel”. I wrote a nihilistic editorial referring to Orwellian disaster, and the truth was the clock was sitting at three minutes to Midnight, something not to be taken lightly.

I suspect most of my friends in the same or similar age-group reflect back on what were perceived to be good times of the eighties despite its obvious flaws. The information age was just beginning to emerge and everything we did in the eighties was bigger and better than it had ever been before. The eighties gave us Top Gun wings and we flew, Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester Stallone made sure we would survive even if times were hard. I sent more than one failed relationship out the door in my pink legwarmers. I didn’t get swept off my feet by some Richard Gere, Officer type but I had fun trying. I am still convinced I owe a little bit of my own fortitude and resilience to Goldie Hawn’s performance in Private Benjamin and accepted my own quirks and foibles because of characters like Ally in the Breakfast Club.

Perhaps the ra-ra skirts and Club Tropicana were our own way of shaking off the pervasive doom that had settled on us throughout the previous decade, which had been punctuated by strikes, unrest, fuel shortages and the three day week. We had come together as a nation to celebrate the Silver Jubilee, to protect our territory in the Falklands and to see our magical Princess wed her Prince and yet still the Cold war raged and the doomsday clock ticked on.

The dystopian nightmare of the nuclear propaganda machine, the make-shift attempts at fall-out shelters for Panaorma documentaries and the secret world beneath our cities seemed to be a dark shadow of a murky past once Gorbachev came to power in 1985 as I moved away to University. The cold war was over and just after my 23rd birthday, the Berlin wall came down, to me the very symbol of the spies and lies and iron curtain and all that we had feared.

Have we now come full circle, is this the return of the nightmare that was. What time is it now Mr Wolf?

©AlisonJean Hankinson

Link to the original Squirrel 1984.

There is only one video clip I can think off to celebrate/acknowledge both then and now:

In the space between……

I heard your voice

You sounded distant, a far cry in a deserted hall

Somewhere beyond the silent space that I occupy.

You are on the tip of my tongue

A familiar sound, an enunciated vowel

More than a cursory utterance of love.

In my dreams my arms reach out to embrace you.

I catch a glimpse of you as the shadows recede and the sun filters in through the shutters

But you have already left, and all I have is the empty space that you once occupied.

For Day 14 of napowrimo.

With love to all. May you have peace in your hearts and compassion in your soul.

Man in the doorway…

Deadbeat

Bereft- bile rising on a tide of crimson tears

Soul surrendered.

Forget the humdrum faces of the faithful

Languish in the liminality of loss that lengthens the hours of every day since.

Bury your head. Bury your heart.

That which hath gone and cannot be gathered

For the past is passed, and whilst not to be forgotten cannot pulse again with life

Dust beckons.

Hooded, labelled, lost on the fringe

Of a world that ceased to care, no compassion.

Deadbeat.

This isn’t my usual style and it is a poem for the man in the doorway many months ago, perhaps it is his back-story. It is for Napowrimo day 13.

This is for open link night with d’Verse.

Beneath the skin- The raw.

Haemorraghing hatred and fear

Poison oozing out through every microscopic pore

Spilling forth with septic spores of mistrust and malevolence.

I know not this place where I find myself.

I wish I had a rose for every time you spoke my name

The world would be a mesmerising memorial to you.

I catch my image in the mirror and see you have left all the hallmarks of your own life and loves upon my face, they are etched deep beneath the skin.

Sometimes I lose myself and see only you.

And I am faceless and forlorn.

I know not this place where I find myself.

There was a summer, a sea breeze,

A silent longing for a solitary moment of the life that was before.

These shores have weathered fierce and tumultuous tides

And now the pain recedes

And I am left awash with grief.

The hollow dreams, the futile hopes, the empty promises.

And I know not this place where I find myself.

This is my offering for d’Verse open link night. The photo is my own, the white rose symbolises new beginnings and also remembrance.