I have just been listening to Ruby Wax on Desert Island Discs explaining how
at home she felt when she was in the mental hospital and this old poem
jumped into my head...
Fourteen
At fourteen I wrote down
How terrible it was
For my English teacher:
The business of no love
And nobody there.
He never mentioned my essay.
The woods and the gardens
Were clothed in the brightness of green.
I stood and watched a woodpecker drill away.
Beating pathways through the nettles
I created a living pattern,
Every moment of the summer I was outdoors
Living wild phantasies of my imagination,
Winter and night-times I retreated into books;
The material for the summer's onslaught.
Reality was not for me,
I had had enough of that.
I left the world early,
It has never come back to me.
I exist between the squeaks of my poems
Like some empty tomb.
I have never lived.
Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
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