at half-mast

I will take my life published in I am not a silent poet (January 17, 2016). Thank you Reuben Woolley!

Click here to read the poem : I will take my life

The recent passing of Samantha Hunt, a poet from Birmingham, UK, made me write this piece. I knew her only across her poems that had appeared on I am not a silent poet. Her words are now hanging “from a beautifully grotesque hook” to paraphrase her own words:

I was pulled in by strings.
Everything was blue, bitter blue.
The kind of blue that made me glad to
be alive.

Alive, she was piling words for us who think poetry is all about craftsmanship, word clouds, colonization of imaginative territory, etc. We did not realize alive, she was piling questions for herself and building her own death for the world. How can we just believe in poetry?

That blue was a/
brutal caress.
It’s not going to stop/
it’s not going to stop/
Skin. Skin was all that I had
A sugar paper quilt,
A translucent defence against the light/
Oh, the light. The light.

(From Drawing with light by Samantha Hunt  )

Who is at peace with the world when we say RIP? For us, mourning is the right time to pile questions and words to serve the moment, not before!

Here’s an extract from a poem called Letting go posted on her Facebook page on December 10, 2015:

It’s all over now, Baby Blue on repeat.
It’s the gentle hum of the nurse’s pen
as it grazes her notebook:
Zoplicone. Sertraline. Quetiapine. Duolextine.
One milligram. Two milligrams. Three –
One of these snaps the synapses
back into shape, deadens the music;
fleshes the tree’s bones.

And here’s her New year post. She thought it summed things up nicely:

‘‘The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” – David Foster Wallace

Thank you.