I will show you the life of the mind on prescription drugs
From the mysterious recesses of the mind (or is that brain?) comes the urge to fix our sadness! Drugs are the answer, allied with literature. Legal, prescribed drugs, by hurried doctors, which reroute synapses in millions of human beings consciousnesses.
What is the poetry of this ubiquitous but hidden malforming of the already overblown 21st human mental experience? In England, of all places? Who knows?!
Brain
A grey stretch of foam and dry rubble, a lot less wet than you’d think, with a few rubber elevations, a few hills and valleys, and on the other side, the great barrenness of a come-uppance. Mean, like a desert. But small, like a walnut.
What is possible is that this organ is not accurately depictable. That is, if you were to see a picture of it, whether photographed, drawn or designed, it would not, in any way, sense or form, appear as it is. For there is a desperate lag between what it looks like and how it works. Function obscures form. It is an uncanny ravine. Or, it is a funny blob. That everything ever resides inside a dreary sponge. The kind of urine trapped in an old bone bottle. You can imagine a doctor in a white facemask recoiling at the smell as its removed from an open-top skull. But not your skull?
An undistinguished sort of object. A box towards intelligence, but still holding a journey towards it. A road, not a receptacle, or safe. It is not secure, nor sturdy, really. If it can leak out of a hole, then how formidable can it be? People used to trepan it easily enough. It does swell from time to time. And yet we use the metaphor of swelling more for the heart.
The Patients
The patients
are the
only ones
that truly
maintain
the friendship
of the pill,
and are
everyday
holding
a proper
funeral
for the microbe.
Here are 12 ways your problems are your own fault
Born too late to explore the world
Born too early to explore the universe
Born just in time for this
Show me your shy office
where your heart is blue
Show me your dark valley
where your heart is blood
Show me your dark heart
where brains > hearts
Show me the cup from which to drink room temperature mercury.
Side effects of citalopram, otherwise known as sold the dark
My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast
- Gerald Manley Hopkins
can we memory a tradition
can we with our mouths open
can we moth onto film
can we fertile a shaved sly
can we grip the dim
can we hurdle children’s instrument
can we electric smudge
can we meet new year
can we murder
can we trauma travel
can we cold
can we know the air is unkind
can we know the old hairs of the hopeless
can we sow
can we rope breasts
can we say your shirt is open
can we close buttons to stop that
can we trot not to know how everyone around is
no
Click here to learn more about SJ Fowler’s fantastic new book: I will show you the life of the mind on prescription drugs…