Trigger warning: self-harm, discussion of mental illness
i. Think about what you have done to your body
A beautiful mezzo-soprano strips down to her shorts on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. Her thighs are unmarred, calves shaven quick to the skin. She smiles a big stage smile, bright with teeth; her shorts wrap around her waist like a man’s arms. Do you understand yet? You will never be able to do this—could never slip off a skin so sexily, split without the splitting of hairs, the spitting-out of night air in your mouth. The body is ridiculous, your English lecturer tells you. Every centimetre of it an impractical joke. It’s at night when it comes—the lust. You think Chris Tse once wrote about wolves on the dance floor. Of flower petals, bloody jaws, the neon thump of disco. In practice it all goes down without a howl. You don’t have any preferred instrument, but the ornate ones are always nice. The letter-opener. The scissors. No special significance is cast upon them—once they have done their job, they return to being objects, sitting on dressing tables quivering and sharp. Did I request this, Maker? they ask. You know no answer. Your own creation could not be helped and your apology is in its destruction.
ii. Lineate your progeny
Mary Shelley wrote in her diary: Find my baby dead. Awake and find no baby. All the poets off in the shades and glades of paper-pulp history and Mary there finding suddenly no baby, no baby anymore. You are descended from lines of women called Mary, all chosen, as if discarding their foreignness and taking on the name of the Virgin would redeem them. They worked hard for this life you live now, of poetry and cocktails at night with boys who wear glasses and read Auden. Do you understand yet? You try to track lines of instability, the family stories of debts and outbursts and weeping, secretly hoping you find nothing. You want to be sick. For the sickness to be yours and yours alone, not a jade pendant handed down to you through time and circumstance. Once, you were so sure of it, the milk-powder sickness of having children. These days you don’t trust it so much.
iii. Prove that you are sick enough
You will never prove it. They found Lord Byron lying in a ditch after days of non-stop orgies and drinking. Was it enough then? Percy Shelley was given laudanum for his nervous attacks. He walked in his sleep through the pitch-dark Romantic streets. Hector Berlioz fell in love after seeing an actress perform just once, then followed her home night after night, trapping her in his symphonies like a moth under glass. All the poets and composers crushing girls like bugs just to scoop up the rosy-pink entrails. Was it enough then? Were they mad—any of them? In an ugly blue uniform, you once watched your classmate hold a pair of red safety scissors to her knee, saying she was really going to do it, really this time. That day you went home and sliced down your wrist in a neat scabby slit, covered up by your satin dinner jacket, still from the children’s section of Farmer’s. To prove it. To prove that she was just stupid—but you were really crazy, really, really crazy, for real.
iv. Make a list of intangible things
Your friend has a list of intangible things. The night. The past. Love. You want to add: The body. The body that was once the baby. The body parts sewn and reanimated, crude poet’s stitching on the guts barely escaping pinky-nude flesh. Your body, made of your mother and father and all those who have touched it since. Mothers can lose teeth and hair from being pregnant, all of their resources depleted. Thoughts like these sometimes make you realise how juvenile it all is, this leaning tits-first out of windows and weeping into the blue night’s wind. For God’s sake, Shelley, you want to say, stop smoking opium in the bushes and get back home to your wife, who has no baby, who had a baby but now has a body. Do you understand yet? Each spark of desire in your flesh was once electrified into being. A vast history of someones made you—do not forget this fact.
v. Define your definitions
Nothing makes you want to write poetry more than well-meaning doctors. They sit in offices that have condoms in them and throw endless sticky notes into endless hallways. Clever thing, they call you, like it means something. Writing a poem is like taking a smoke break, a quick dip outside before you return to the white-walled anguish of flickering telephones. I need to prove it, you think. Prove that I have created something beyond myself. You know too well how the day-to-day fades into boot-sloshing monotony, know why we still remember MoMA curators and church organists for their writing and not their lives. You unsheathe the pills from their foil wrappings anyway and you take them, their neat half-slit dissolving under your tongue. Maybe they work, maybe they don’t. They can’t shake the years that seep into you like the plasma in your blood, wine-white and finely spun. You did not come into being from a rib or a dubious scientific experiment or an act of divine intervention. You were created a long time ago and that time sits heavy and heavier the more that it eats.
vi. Provide the proof
You don’t really like martinis in hotel lobbies but you brave through them anyway. Life is full of modern delights, like girls with nose rings and photos of faraway places. They tell you that it’s a personality disorder and you are glad, truly glad, because the Romantics loved to faint in parlours and tremble with sublime suffering but in the end, they were still lying in the gutter with nothing but a handful of poetry to show for it. Sometimes understanding is not enough, like when you lie with yourself for hours in bed until your arms start to feel your own again. You are hungry and cannot deny it. You want the nose-sharp tang of blood. You want the head of desire brought to you on a plate. It’s not right and you know it but nothing else will satiate the petrol-stench of unease under your skin. You want the moment—the flash of flesh, the rapture of lightning and thunder—and for it all to come alive again.