[poem] Too Much Memory

[dhcdavid]

When I sit alone in this darkened room
Peering uncaring through the smoky haze,
All I can do is recall the past over and over again:
I remember how back then I had no millstone to carry round;
And was so beautifully naive and carefree - my soul
Was light, unburdened, as free as the lark and
Evil was still a far-off alien concept.
Nowadays though life is so very far from being easy and joyful:
I sit, numb with apathy and anger, remembering the rapes and abuse;
How quickly and cruelly the theft of my innocence was pulled off,
The callous ease with which my body was brutally raped,
And the confusion I felt as the priest I trusted stole and set fire to my happiness;
Leaving me utterly alone, in physical, spiritual and mental agony -
With sadness from then onwards being my only reliable emotion and companion.
Just like the condemned man must force himself to embrace the end,
I do so wish that I could find the courage to end my existence;
And then the slate in my heart and mind could be wiped clean and the pain would end once and for all.
But alas: I am cursed with too much memory.

As a murderer approaches with an enormous smile,
So to does my memory manically grin
Just like the madman beams like the black sun.
Memory crashes violently onto the psyche's stage, oh so vile.
Burning and tearing at your heart within,
With smug satisfaction the devil carefully surveys the results: his evil work done.
So how then can you say unto me: "Embrace the present -
Look ahead towards the ever forthcoming bright future of tomorrow!
All is not lost: there's way too much beauty and love in the world to fight for!"
I see no help whatsoever from God - nothing to support or help me in my mental fight.
The black-clad lady of sorrow stands dark and demure in the shadows:
Challenging justice and morality to a fight to the death.
But in my head, sadly my dark past returns time and again to haunt me and torture me -
Without understanding why I deserve to relive rape and sexual abuse repeatedly,
I seem to be cursed with way too many dark thoughts and far too much memory.

(London - 27th June, 1999......Updated for Publication: Kent, South-East England - September 2011)

 

[herbavore]

my dark past returns time and again to haunt me

I wish that there were a way that we could literally bear some part of each others burdens sometimes. Your poem was written in 1999. Has there ever been another in the ensuing years? I hope you have been able to find some peace if this is your story.

 

[copelandia.]

a female friend of mine speaks of the same difficulties, I wish I knew how to help, I feel so useless when trying. like the above poster, I hope you have found some peace within that time. one love.

 

[dhcdavid]

Thankyou herbavore and copelandia for your kind and thoughtful replies.

I've deleted the long post I made here and moved it instead to The Dark Side where I think it's probably more suited.

 

[herbavore]

Yes, I do have a reply for you. I implore you to seek a different kind of help.

Before my son died of an overdose, he used to become very hopeless and list all the ways he was trapped, all the ways he felt like a failure. Then he would get high to try to escape those feelings and compound everything that had been making him feel bad in the first place (another arrest, a more serious charge, losing another job, etc.) and so he would "prove" to himself how hopeless everything was.

Let me tell you what I saw, as the person that loved him. I saw that his only failure was an inability to forgive himself for reacting to pain.

None of those external things are so horrible. Not having a job sucks but plenty of people are right there with you for all sorts of reasons. Getting the right kind of psychological help is where you need to start. I have a lot empathy for you in this endeavor because so much of the field, (from therapists to psychiatrists), is dismally off-track to the point of uselessness. So, it will take work; it takes digging and rejecting and looking some more, until you find someone that can offer something that resonates with you. For my son, it was a very kind social worker that had had a twenty-five year heroin addiction who took the time to listen to my son's objections to twelve step and got him into meditation. I think that if he had had more time this might have saved him.

You were brutalized as a child. The scars from that kind of experience are horrendous. You have internalized the shame that never should have been yours. In the depression mega thread on TDS there is so much information about different kinds of treatment that can address what you are experiencing. I know that you must feel very tired. You have tried so hard for a very long time. I have the utmost faith that with support from others and a different kind of treatment that you can purge the self-loathing that the past has created in you. Please try to have hope. PM me if you need to. I mean that.

 

[CoffeeDrinker]

Keep writing. It's always something that helps me untie the knots in my mind and examine who I am more fully. If I ever have a serious regret, it'd be that I don't write enough. Life is art and art is life. Metaphor is a device that can help uncover deep parts of you by connecting parts that you'd normally think have nothing to do with one another. I'm no counselor, but I am an aspiring writer/musician/recovering addict, and the best thing that I have ever done for myself was getting into writing, keeping a journal, and poetry. the world you create is 100% your own at that moment in time, but it's amazing reading back things that you wrote years later and either relating to them or in shock that you used to think a certain way. Are you still feeling like the tone of this poem suggests? I offer you 100% support, and you can PM me and talk any time you want.

Try some free association exercises to explore things that seem randomly put together to your conscious mind, but really dive deep, and give whichever random metaphor you come up with a chance to grow, and explore it, and explore how it can be meaningful. It is a device that gives form, or some vague shape, to these ill-defined shadows in your mind that lurk there, but you can't really give them definition, poetic reflection seems to be the only way to access and sort-of massage that part of your self.

I really liked this one:
"The black-clad lady of sorrow stands dark and demure in the shadows:
Challenging justice and morality to a fight to the death."

That's highly expressive, and purely factual at the same time. I mean, I feel like I know exactly what you're talking about with that. It also reminds me of this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdJx86b0wuc

The piece itself is pretty interesting. How much conscious effort did you put into it? It looks more like something that just kinda flowed out, but the first stanza is just like stark reality, nothing is metaphorical really, and it's bleak. The second stanza is very impressionistic and metaphorical. The contrast between the two creates a nice effect IMO. That makes me think you put more work into than it appears on first glace.