Description

By Julian Swinbourne

ISBN: 978-1-84991-428-4
Published: 2011
Pages: 121
Key Themes: Psychosis, Poetry, Mental Health, Addiction

Description

This is my third book of poetry, each volume of work tells its only story.
Words all sprung from total mental brake down, words of finding beauty in recovery.

From drug dependency, surprisingly the thing I gained from so much sorrow loss and pain, was vision, blissful vision via devastation of the soul,
From so much that was dark I managed to see the faint light flickering, and in following it I emerged from the nightmare rabbit hole world into a new dawn.
I hope my words give each reader a little flickering of light.
It’s easy for us all to become lost, even in the everyday world.
But I thing pre programmed within us all are the coordinates for each of us to find our own way home.

About the Author

In 2003 I was diagnosed with psychosis after suffering 2 attacks and total breakdown. It was then that is was put under psychiatric care, this included medication and intensive counselling that carries on to this day…
On the whole my health suffers ups and downs, but as with any mental illness the downs can be awful.

Not long after first starting to suffer with my mental illness I started to write poetry on an online forum that proved to be very popular, this gave me an internet following for my work that continues to this day…
I found that by using poetry I was able to express the pain and rare joys of how I see the world since I became ill
From my illness I also began to see a beauty in very many things.
Sadly in 2009 I started to self medicate myself with an opiate narcotic and this led to a serious opiate addiction that lasted for two years, in that time I again lost control of my life and spiralled into bleakness…
Thankfully when I hit rock bottom and was desperate for help I was able to seek it from the drug dependency help organisation TURNING POINT.

I have now been clean for months and I am on a government run drug treatment programme, during all this I also had to struggle with episodes reoccurring of my mental illness,
This latest book for chipmunka I think reflects my time of struggle between addiction and mental illness, it contains words from my soul and I hope it gives a unique insight into my life

Book Extract

NEEDLES & PINS

Needles and pins
Baby where you bin.
Hairs such a mess
There dirt on your dress
Blood clot hair
Conceals your diminished
Glare,
But it’s to know where
you stare.
For our purpose has
Become diminished
By the spiral dance.
The downward route.
Another day forgotten
after distraction was
collected along
the windswept riverside path.
Waiting for the connection,
the shadow man
or
the corpse face woman.
both
Have blood on their
Hands.
For they sell sweetness,
that soon turns bitter
& sour.
Another passing hour
All purpose lost to a
Dream, for we’ve
Skipped out of the day.
Unaware we’ve lost our
Way. We hang out in cotton
Candy sickening clouds.
Or ride the waves of
Nausea on a raft of
Flower petals.
Drifting nowhere
Aren’t we.
Lost at
Sea you and me
Actors
in a repeating tragedy.
Death could take
me so easily.
Mortis unnoticed sneaking
into my house.
Coldly creeping up
The stairs.
To catch me sleeping.
I thought I’d fight at the
End, pleading for more
Time to spend loving
the light, swooning within
the night.
But now I know, this
Just isn’t so.