Here is an extract from the one hour poem Das Gift. Show me how to live and die. Written in 2 days by Alice Smith (survivor, writer, mother, teacher, optimist)
Das Gift
Show me how to live and die.
Take my hand and lead me lightly through my life...make it end in sunlight.
Show me how to play with shadows and win.
Listen to my cries when I am emptying it all out over my shoes.
Help me lose.
Squeeze my ugly and lift up my body flaws every single decade tighter and tighter and higher and higher.
Help me marry a liar then run barefoot on the silver waves and chase the tail of the wind.
Scatter my windows with stars and keep me awake to count them.
Show me how to lose a lover and a cage.
Show me how to lose myself and still,
face the mirror to check for proof of age.
Show me flowers in the snow, patterns in the ashes, birdsong in January, smiles at the wake.
Help me make sense of all my mistakes, burn the future and drop guilt like it’s hot.
Forget me not.
Show me the seconds of belief, the hours of nurturing, the days of longing.
Show me years of waste, decades of building then sit and watch me taste destruction.
Show me Death and show me Life.
Show me the in between in dreams that slow my speech and gnaw at my bones.
I’m alone.
We’re all alone at this point in time.
Show me how to live well and die young - or live big and die old.
Show me Heaven and show me Hell.
Show me a choice and a conclusion, amusement and design,
fun and malignant intention,
hatred in rainbows.
Show me! Let me have it all.
Show me how to live and die and kill something I love and lie still
and still lie in the silent night,
eyes wide open to replay it right and pause………
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
Show me how to dance with angels I have slain and trample on them barefoot again.
Show me how to love empty handed and empty hearted.
Fill me up with someone else’s visions of my unstarted future.
Show me how to fly high and plunge into cold water through ice that cracks and hisses.
Show me all my hits and misses.
Blindfold me and leave me for Time’s ticks….
And when they slow - which they will - unwrap me and show me weak sunlight….
If that is all there is
copyright Alice Smith
Founder of 361 Life Support to the descriptive adjectives eg optimist and can you add a link to our website? We are a not for profit organisation supporting survivors.
The link is 361lifesupport.co.uk
(Extract from a one hour poem called Das Gift)
Without writing I would literally not be here. Writing and creativity flourishes in times of mental health distress and trauma because we are somehow able to access splintered and fragmented parts of ourselves for the first time. By listening to these new parts of self we can access the most surreal ideas which are not only classed as 'art' but can be used to innovate and offer society a vision (or a glimpse) of how it could be otherwise. PTSD helped me to transform my rage after losing my mental health, job and then home - to gain my freedom from an abusive marriage. How else to express the complete loss of me?
I subsequently wrote, produced and toured 4 shows of my work at Brighton,, Bath and Edfringe and then internationally to WAVE Berlin and the Women's Economic Forum in India. I suppose you could say I was a creative activist before that word existed. What i did not realise was that I was futuring - providing a vision of my own mental health future though art when I could not see it as a daily possibility.
Widening the picture, now 7 years into my recovery, I have discovered that we can use the same skills of art and expression and creativity to innovate and create something new that can help society ask - what is not being talked about? What is not being said? Is it society - not us - that is Not Enough? The creation of 361 Life Support (recovery with compassion for survivors) has the ultimate futuring tagline - victim, survivor, what lies beyond? BEYOND must be our focus for mental health post covid. Not simply beyond COVID but beyond our lifetimes (environmental concerns) and beyond the current flawed and limiting mental health and education system. In some ways we are in the beyond NOW and art helps us to create a vision of where we are heading and bring that vision into being. It's a curious alchemy and producing and performing in shows was fun but in 2021 we are beyond fun. The future of mental health is a time of seeing it as it really is. We have an obligation to be a witness to this in troubled times.
From this evolution in my thinking (borne out of my mental health recovery and sobriety) Das Gift was written. It's a one hour poem and it was written in an attic overlooking the sea - with no tv, sofa or fridge. It provides an other worldly vision of our future as grown ups - of beyond. It's called 'medicine for the soul' and an 'antidote in troubled times' and is arranged in doses on the written page. The extract I have submitted is dose one of 24. Readers or listeners are warned to -'sip small doses' but 'finish the course.' Das Gift mean poison in German and stems from the idea that too much reality can be poisonous. We can only take in a small amount of it at one time. The speaker urges an unknown someone with all the answers 'Show me' but too much clear sight is a blessing and a curse. 'Das Gift' is a gift to listeners and readers in troubled times but - as with all poisons and antidotes - they can be harmful in large doses.
I wanted to keep the filming grainy and real with pauses as I sometimes struggle to remember the lines and I also wanted to portray the lived experience of a menopausal midlife women in an authentic way. It's an extremely midlife poem.
Alice Smith