Podcast Poetry

Around 40 years ago an injury left me unconscious for three days and nights. It was a pivotal time in my life and my perceptions of what took place during that time of unconsciousness are still vivid as memory.

This poem is a brief summary of what took place in which turned out to be a fork in the road of my journey in this supposedly 3D world.

There is a scene in Asylum, a movie from 2005, that struck me in so many ways that I hit the rewind button perhaps hundreds of times over the years (perhaps indicative of my own issues upstairs) -

Stella has either lost the plot completely, or achieved enlightenment. I sway to the latter. The release of all attachment. So much so that she watches her son drown with a chilling detachment that some might call indifference, until she's snapped out of her fatal reverie. The scene mesmerised me.

Here's the movie Asylum (2005)

Mother and son are at the river around the 1.10.30 mark.

The poem harks back to the time I was staying at a rehab in Bow, East London. I went out for a typically aimless walk and found myself in one of the many railway arches in London (and the rest of the UK)

It turned out to be an incredible experience, more so, I think, because it was unexpected. It was like slipping into an alternative reality. A truer reality in my opinion.  This took place in the early nineties. It wasn't until the early noughties that I wrote about it, realising in the writing just how much I recalled of it, and how impactful it was.  

I submitted the poem to the Writers Forum competition in 2010 and won first prize - £100 and publication in the mag.  Great encouragement to carry on writing!