It feels as though this poem came straight out of the younger aspects of myself, and it’s as if they are speaking both to my therapist, now, and to my mother, then. I wrote it very soon after my last session – I hadn’t been expecting to write a poem but the first two verses spilled out, quite unexpectedly, in seconds. They were a kind of free association by poetry – it really felt as though they were writing themselves, arising from a deeper part of me and bypassing conscious processing and analysis. I didn’t feel as though I could leave those two verses hanging and so I added the rest, the words feeling more consciously chosen this time.

In therapy I had been talking about family deaths I had experienced as a child, and the way in which I was both more involved and more excluded than I could bear to be. I was ‘along for the ride’ while my parents looked after others; but I wasn’t communicated with about it, or helped with my own feelings (if anyone realised I had feelings about the situation). The picture behind the words is about the darkness of pain, but also about being kept in the dark. At the same time it’s about the door being ajar and being aware and frightened of what was going on, even if I couldn’t see or hear things clearly. It’s about things that I saw that were never talked about; and about things that were talked about in my presence that shouldn’t have been. The capital letters and lack of punctuation feel ‘loud’, unformed and childlike; a spontaneous, painful, ‘young-me’ plea……

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