Flesh Sucked

Someone has suckered out my blood and guts from the feet up.

I am skin and bone.

My flesh has absconded; and zapped the living life out of me.

I am white.

I am dead. 

Isobel Knight

Squeezed

Squeezed

Squeezed and in the ringer, I am backed into a corner

I can’t get around it and I can’t get over it.

Laser-beam eyes scan for escape, but the wall, it has suckers and my last exhalation made.

There isn’t much time left you know.

Outside they are all laughing at my plight and pointing their fingers.

I am absolutely desperate, but they think it is a joke.

As the vein on my neck pops, and my eyes bulge, they know the punch line.

Hanger, Ha Ha.

Isobel Knight ©

Nightmares Chase my Sleep

Nightmares Chase my Sleep

Sleep succumbs after an hour.

She sweetly slumbers, hardly.

Four drugs later, including anti-sickness to counteract the new one and we go down to come up, or is that go up to come down?

I wake in a sticky sweat and I remember.

I am hugely anxious. Did I forget to add up the wrong column? Who else got paid wrongly?

Many questions- not my fault. I didn’t do the last invoicing. Yet, why I am affected?

The corridors are like a maze, they are ingrained in my brain.

Everyone can see me as if I am naked.

I feel their eyes in the back of my head.

Persecuted.

Bang.

I am really worried now.

Gall swills at the back of my throat and my pyjamas are sticky with the beaded sweat of adrenaline.

I feel as if I am about to give a performance and I am more charged than a power station.

My heart is a race-horse where there is nowhere to bolt.

I am feverishly tossing and turning.

I wonder if I am going mad.

In the past this would have been a breakdown.

I get up to go somewhere else, but the memories follow me, haunting my every step.

Isobel Knight ©

The Writing

The writing.

I didn’t want to.

My muscles clung around me like hungry bears.

Needles made their point in numerous occasions around my being, the duvet took cover.

My eyelids a broken blind, rammed shut against the light; my eyes disappeared into the background.

It was too much too move. I didn’t.

It was too much too move. I couldn’t.

A giant ball of chaos, my muscles unpicked themselves in reverse spiral.

I got about, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know where. I didn’t know how.

I trudged to my computer and put it on. It was as lively as I was dead.

Your fresh page drew me. My fingers choreograph the words.

Isobel Knight©

Fog of Clarity

Fog of clarity

I had nearly survived the day. Any longer, and I would have done.

The minute hand had been busy; it had marched around several times;

Only the hours stacked up miserably as if it hadn’t been worth it.

It hadn’t.

The greyness of the day held in suspension

I was enveloped in a cloying fog of clarity.

Chaos was the order of the day.

Night took no prisoners and held me at ransom in a rocking and a tossing,

In a barrel to eternity,

Through a void of light

Ending and starting, finishing and beginning.

On and on and on and on and off.

Isobel Knight©

Long

Long

Time went on forever and ever and ever and fucking ever

I hadn’t asked it to. I didn’t decide. It just ran on and on and on

And on and on and on.

We were heading towards the night shift – my eyes had called it a day.

It was a bloody long way back to bed, and I had to walk.

There was all this space to trip over and air to navigate.

I trudged through the room, falling over the vacuum, hitting the softness of the walls.

Isobel Knight

© 2012