Poems Shame Series 2 - Couples Therapy, Training, Personal Development and PBSP Psychotherapy

These poems were read on Shame Series 2 Module 6: Shame, Truama, Dysfunction and Abuse March 2022

The Angel of the Aftershock
A recurring nightmare

Forty years later she still returned
over and again, from high above,
an angel, at the edge of sleep,
smiling, benign, as warm as milk,
a face so pure there were no words,
maybe from a time before
words could be formed.

He thought of her often.
It was always a ‘she’ — a nurse
perhaps or some such figure
from early days, in hospital,
before the surgeons and the pain —
leaning right over, into his cot,
filling his vision, his consciousness.
Yes, a nurse, a sister, a matron perhaps.
a professional, not a family member,
not an aunt… Surely not his mother.

In that moment his body would relax
as if it never knew what always followed.
For every time the angel re-appeared
he shrank, to know himself quite helpless,
tiny hands confined, tied above his head,
(he’d still wake in that position for years)
as the angel descended, from on high
to lean-in, smiling, always smiling,
until she turned into a screaming skull.

Solitary

I spoke to a man in prison
With a broken look in his eye.
I spoke to this man, who’d been in the hole
And I spoke to the man who put him there
Though he couldn’t tell me why.

………It’s a hell of a way from Folsom
………To the prisons of the heart,
………But the bars are there
………And the walls are bare
………And the hole can tear your soul apart.

I spoke to a man who did murder
And he spoke of the man that he killed —
And the day he died, they both of them fried,
For the Law had a taste for homicide
On the day that blood was spilled.

………It’s a long way from a Friday night
………To the Death Rows of regret,
………But we’re all in a cell
………With a story to tell
………And we’ve all done things we can’t forget.
………We’ve all done things we can’t forget.

I dreamt of a man in an empty room
As he swung from a lonely rope.
And his silence raged in the quiet there
With his wife on the stair and his kids unaware
That they were about to lose all hope.

………For we are all in solitary
………Held in the cells of the mind,
………Alone in a cage
………With our shame and our rage
………Waiting for fate to turn the page
………Or prove that she is blind.

………Everyone in solitary,
………Not a one of us free:
………Waiting for the pain
………To come round again,
………Waiting in vain for the snap of a chain,
………Waiting for the turn of a key.

Cut Grass and Nicotine

I could tell you about the pity and the waste,
the way I watched him disintegrating,
slowly becoming the bloated wreck
that lay on the floor in a drunken puddle.
Or I could try to talk about the shame
he heaped upon me those acid afternoons.
That’s dangerous because I get stuck again
in the angry limbo that held me back then.
I could tell you about the shock of finding him,
snarling in death and grinning obscenely;
of magically thinking that I had murdered him,
killed my own father with my ill will;
carrying his corpse for twenty years; falling
to my knees with weight of his memory.
But it’s harder, much harder, even now
to talk about the ache for the spaces where
the quiet atonements might have been made;
to say
to say
to say that I still love him,
and that somewhere inside me there’s a boy
who pines for the warm and comforting
odour of him, the starched-cotton crispness
softened with sweat and brilliantine,
the cut-grass freshness and the stale cigarettes;
to say after years of acid bile and bitterness
that sometimes I miss and yearn for my father.

William Ayot
The Inheritance
PS Avalon 2011

Things to Carry with You as You Leave the Ruins

First, bring your careful animal body
To test the ground as it shifts beneath you,
Your six strong senses to get you through the night,
The sinew and muscle you took for granted,
Your red-raw hands, your gut, your heart,
The wrathful snarl, which shocked you once,
That now, like a tyger could save your life.

Next, pack the sweetness of all that is gone
The gallery of smiles, the faded images,
From the dog-eared scrapbooks of tribe and kin
Left in a corner, long forgotten —
The silly songs, the half-remembered melodies,
the tired jokes and indulgent groans,
The lingering imprint of a hand on your cheek,
A tender reminder of your attendant dead,
And the kindness in those who did such harm.

Remember the smell of your own rich soil,
The scent of its trees, their leaves and needles,
The stones you kicked that seemed to have no value
That now you’d give gold to carry in your hand.
And as you hear the rumble of distant collapse,
Far away and fading as you take your leave,
Be mindful too that there was once a joy
In every waking and every morning
That you were a part of, albeit unaware.
That you were at home in your part of the world,
That you are beloved of the spirits of place.

These poems were read on Module 5: Shame, Sex and Body: February 2022

The Blessing and The Curse

You ask about shame — not sure of what it is —
Oh, the definitions are clear enough. You’ve read
Your Bradshaw, your Brown, your Kaufman.
You’ve watched the videos, listened to podcasts
And you’ve come to a sense of shame’s ubiquity

But the fact that you ask means one of two things:
Either you’ve flown free of shame’s toxicity,
Or, like a goldfish orbiting its bowl,
You’re unaware that shame is what you swim in —
the very water that supports and surrounds you.

To know its depth, you need to know your body,
To let yourself detach — to allow descent —
To tumble like a leaf or a clod of earth,
Already knowing the sickening certainty,
The all-awaiting thud of perpetual falling.

To feel shame’s fullness, you need to fill your nostrils
With the foul and acrid stench of yourself,
To feel your gorge rise at your own proximity —
To be disgusted, to loathe your very presence,
To shun the part of you that needs loving the most.

To understand the binding hate of shame
Is to glimpse your nakedness and be struck dumb,
To stand before a mirror and be appalled,
To see your one, blessed body as a lie
and turn away, shuddering, as from a crime.

To know the enormity of shame
Is to look at a razor blade as if it were a friend
Or to see your only child as an enemy,
A target, and worthy in their worthlessness,
Of carrying your curse down another generation.

You ask about shame — better not to know
Or knowing to at least have a way of forgetting.
There’s the rub — we tend to run away —
Who would not, given half a choice —
Shame or love, tranquillity or madness,
The grail of compassion, or the poisoned cup.

William Ayot
Mathern, February 2022
Unpublished. Please do not share on the web.

Across a Crowded Room

Who’s that? What an extraordinary face.
And look at those eyes, amazing eyes.
Kind of — familiar. She’s looking over here.
You could get lost in those eyes.

I wonder if we’ve met before?
It’s as if we know each other already.
Maybe we were lovers in another life,
long ago, like Antony and Cleopatra.

Yes, we’re probably an ongoing item.
We came together: we were torn apart.
We loved, we lost, we betrayed each other,
compelled by an all-consuming passion.

And now we’ve spotted each other again.
Venus and Mars will collide right here.
There’ll be sparks, desire, a couple of children,
separations and tearful reconciliations.

Finally one of us is going to call it a day.
They’re going to croak and desert the other one.
I don’t know why we bother, really.
Here she comes… What are you looking at?

A Silence

My father is nursing a glass of India Pale Ale
while my mother is wiping down the bar,
hanging damp tea-towels over the pumps.
I’m sitting in the inglenook, feet against the fire,
gripping a book entitled “Disasters For Boys”,
and wishing I hadn’t come in for lunch.
Something has been said, some wounding truth,
about money or love or the lack of both..
My father has taken it on the chin, he’s reeling,
while my mother has a frozen look about her,
a blend of defiance and appalled realization.
She’s gazing down at her work-scarred hands
as if they were holding a smoking revolver.
My dad looks down at the rich, chestnut beer,
hoping for a kindness or a sudden inspiration.
I look down too, because that’s what we do
in our diffident, demoralised, defeated clan.
There’s a faint scent of beeswax on my fingers
and the musty library smell of the book.
The logs stop their spitting and, outside the window,
the sparrows give up their incessant bickering.
My mother stays scared. My father stays empty
and I am learning to stay invisible. In the silence
our sad, exhausted family, is scattered to the winds.

These poems were read on Module 4: The Children of Shame: January 2022

A Little Victory in a Long War

Unworthy, unlovable,
Too soiled to belong,
I bought the family lie.
I was simply wrong.

First the skin is peeled away,
Then the salt’s applied.
Nothing’s ever good enough.
There’s nowhere to hide.

And love’s a crucifixion,
A groping, hopeless prayer,
A mud-bubbling, up-thrust
of hot, wet despair.

But despite all sorrow,
Things begin to change,
You turn up and you do the work.
You find that you’re just strange.

Yesterday I turned around,
Another decade gone.
I saw a mirror and I did not flinch.
A victory was won.

I am who I am today.
Let it be proclaimed,
I am not a waste of space.
I shall not be shamed.

William Ayot
Mathern, January 2021
Unpublished. Please do not share on the web

Debtor’s Moon

Two o’clock in the morning and the moon
is fingering the furniture like a bailiff.

The father, in flight from the shame
that nails him to the moment, is lying

unconscious, an outstretched hulk,
a pissed and dissipated Sistine Adam,

nicotine-gilded fingers pointing,
towards his empty, brown-bottle god.

The boy has tried to drag him to bed.
He is twelve now. He has failed.

As he sits, benumbed, a foraging mouse
appears in the crook of his father’s arm.

The boy calls out but nothing happens.
He is empty, dumb, becoming invisible.

The father mutters, shifts and snores,
The mouse takes fright and vanishes.

The boy remains, guarding his father,
And the moon slips through the trees.

Flashback

It’s like this. Something kicks it off —
a sharp word, a noise, the soughing of the wind,
an unexpected, complex animal smell —
a thing that is not exactly of the event
but close enough to make the leap,
to confound the present and loop back to the past,
to make of a breeze, or the lemon scent of polish,
a trigger that re-enacts the moment.
Not a drama, with its little lies and embellishments,
its opportunities for creating a bit of mileage,
but the real thing, complete and inescapable,
total immersion in the event itself;
exactly as it happened, in every fibre of your body:
the skin becoming clammy, the chill, the rigidity,
the shutting down of your stomach and liver,
the bile in your throat that is really adrenaline,
the bitter taste that comes with survival.
What you see without seeing, what you hear
without hearing, are the crystals
of memory dissolving in your blood.
Suddenly you are acting from another, older place,
living in two times simultaneously:
your mind alerted, with its calculating edge,
your subtle heart banished to unreachable safety;
the old reptile part of you hanging on,
ready to do anything to get back to the dark,
to peace, to the cool embrace of silence;
and if that means lashing out or hurting, if that
means wounding with tooth, or tongue, or blade,
so be it.
Afterwards the shame, the shaky hands, the staring,
the re-inventions of history, the never-ever-agains.
I have hurt the people that I have loved most dearly,
And try as I may, the truth is, I could hurt them again.
My prayer, as the spiral winds down to its centre,
is that they might come to look at me
without an edge of fear.

These poems were read on Module 3: The Subtle Poison of Shame: December 2021

Eggardon Hill

You slept, and while you slept I climbed the hill,
Treading again the ancient winding path
That leads from the coombe to the grass-grown fort,
Leads to the silences born of the climb.

I brought you violets of different kinds
With primroses and yellow celandines
And something small and white I didn’t know
That grew by a freshet that broke from the hill.

I brought you a blue-black raven’s feather
And curiosities plucked from the turf,
A grinning root-ball, weathered like a skull,
Snail-shells and wonders that caught the thin light.

I brought you shining multicoloured stones
That lay like jewels on the rain-slicked path
And a thorn-twig bearing a shred of wool
That smelled of lanolin and innocence.

On my return I made you a ‘pies nest,
A circle of treasures, laid out to please.
Flowers and stones in juxtaposition
That spoke of the view I’d wanted to share.

You slept, and waiting I watched over you
As the evening gathered and the pebbles dried,
The flowers withered and the wool blew away
Leaving us nothing but thorns and a skull.

These two treasures I brought back from Eggardon,
Natural keepsakes wrapped up in a view.
The view, the wind and the rain I’ll remember
But you, you slept…

William Ayot
Published in: “Small Things that Matter”

Darshan

for Carlos who didn’t make it

A lattice of scar tissue covers his face,
and the eyes are hooded by swollen brows.
What you see is what you get: a wreck,
a boxer who’s taken too many blows,
a man who’s come in like a wandering pi-dog,
anxious yet hungry, desperate to settle.

Fuck it, I’m tired, fellas. I’m really tired.

He wants to do good, he says, to serve;
like the time in Calcutta when he was a kid.
He was just a junkie with nowhere to go
but the Sisters of Charity gave him a job
and a few rupees to keep him going.
All he had to do was bring in the dying.

I was using their money to buy my dope.

His head goes down and suddenly he’s sobbing.
The story comes out in a series of grunts.
One time Mother Theresa was in the passageway.
He was pushed towards her by Sister Audrey.

Mother, this is Carl. He wants to see you.

Carlos froze as the tiny avatar cocked her head,
looked at him from beneath her blue lined sari

He’s fifty now and will never get sober,
but that was a moment that saw him through:
the blessing from the wrinkled little woman,
the eyes that saw, and loved, and forgave.

I’m a piece of shit – you know that, fellas –
but while she was looking at me, I was clean.

Memento

On my wall I have a stone, a remnant
which I liberated from a public park,
from a midden littered with empty cans,
discarded bottles and foul smelling rubbish.
It’s the shoulder of a broken gravestone,
a smashed-off wedge from a limestone truckle.
It boasts a single, barely recognisable face
of careful lettering that says no more than

IN MEM…
and
FRANCES…
WHO DEPAR…
and then
… YEARS…

I know little about it, except that the park
was once the graveyard of a debtor’s prison,
home to the frivolous, and the impecunious.
I saved it, one damp and wintry morning,
after I’d seen it hurled by a wino who screamed
like Moses throwing down the Tablets,
red-faced, indignant, inspired in his rage.
I got it home and hosed it down, scraped it
then scrubbed it, then left it in a tub of bleach.
I wanted, or rather I needed, to make it clean.
Now it’s a memorial to my own prodigal dead:
the bellicose lads and the sad inebriate women,
the blowsy wives and their bitter, defeated men.
At times I can almost smell the tap-rooms,
with their fug of yeast and rough-cut tobacco.
I imagine the faces, determined and cheerful,
three-sheets-to-the-wind or melancholy-sour.
I see the bravery, the fear, the constant striving,
the recurring failure and the turning away.

On my wall, a fragment of broken headstone
to remind me of people who are all but forgotten.
Sometimes I can sit and ponder it, fondly,
at other times, I still need to scrub it clean.

These poems were read on Module 2: Breaking the Cycle – Treating Shame November 2021

Danse Macabre
For PT

You see something behind their eyes,
a look that says I’d like to hurt you,
a message in the body as it reaches forward,
straining towards you like a dog on a leash;
mouth made cruel, muscles corded,
a flare of the nostrils, an involuntary snarl,
the malevolent flicker of a pink, wet tongue.

In an instant you are shutting down
as if nature itself were compressing you.
Your muscles go limp and volition fails.
The whole world seems to move in treacle.

On the outside no one notices a thing —
people who know you see nothing wrong —
while inside, past and present merge,
conjoining in a dance of ancient finality.
At this point a breath could make a signal
as broad as the gestures of a wild flamenco;
the slightest move confirms your submission
as clearly as if you had offered your neck.

So you freeze, like a fallow deer in the forest,
one hoof raised, in total attention, waiting
for the crash of the clumsy hunter, waiting
for the coming of the shadow of death.
And in your head an old tune circulates —
a nursery rhyme, or the ghost of a song.

The words are lost in a roaring silence
but the message is simple: endure, endure.

Flashback

It’s like this. Something kicks it off —
a sharp word, a noise, the soughing of the wind,
an unexpected, complex animal smell —
a thing that is not exactly of the event
but close enough to make the leap,
to confound the present and loop back to the past,
to make of a breeze, or the lemon scent of polish,
a trigger that re-enacts the moment.
Not a drama, with its little lies and embellishments,
its opportunities for creating a bit of mileage,
but the real thing, complete and inescapable,
total immersion in the event itself;
exactly as it happened, in every fibre of your body:
the skin becoming clammy, the chill, the rigidity,
the shutting down of your stomach and liver,
the bile in your throat that is really adrenaline,
the bitter taste that comes with survival.
What you see without seeing, what you hear
without hearing, are the crystals
of memory dissolving in your blood.
Suddenly you are acting from another, older place,
living in two times simultaneously:
your mind alerted, with its calculating edge,
your subtle heart banished to unreachable safety;
the old reptile part of you hanging on,
ready to do anything to get back to the dark,
to peace, to the cool embrace of silence;
and if that means lashing out or hurting, if that
means wounding with tooth, or tongue, or blade,
so be it.
Afterwards the shame, the shaky hands, the staring,
the reinventions of history, the never-ever-agains.
I have hurt the people that I have loved most dearly,
and try as I may, the truth is, I could hurt them again.
My hope, as the spiral winds down to its centre,
is that they might come to look at me
without an edge of fear.

The Bridge

“Working with shame, like working with trauma,
must be done slowly and carefully.” Sheila Rubin

The bridge had been broken years before,
its pillars cracked, its arches fallen,
masonry washed away, far down the valley:
some sidewall here, some pediment there,
memories of a structure that once held good.

Warily they met at the water’s edge —
practically within reach but miles apart.
As the current swirled darkly between them,
they beheld each other. Then one turned away.

Gingerly, however, they both came back,
barely sitting at first, gauging each other:
one crouched, trembling, grey eyes haunted,
the other collected though far from sure —
then gently dipping a toe into the stream;
asking a question, risking the rebuff,
abiding as the slow sun sank behind the hills.

And so it began, block by stealthy block.
Rubble at first, raised on shaky scaffolding;
the occasional blunder or stony collapse —
a flinching followed by a hang-dog return —
spandrels fanning out above rebuilt piers;
buttresses, a keystone carried alternately;
finally a path that brought them together.

Parting they both felt a pang of regret;
Grey-eyes grateful but bereft of words,
the other relieved of the borrowed shame
they had wrestled with as it took so long.

Walking up the path that led from the river,

they turned at the same time, to view the scene
Below them the span they’d constructed together
glowed like a blessing in a kind patch of light.
Finally, Grey-eyes waved and was gone —
sure that the bridge would still be there.

Pietàs

From The Angel & the Nithing**
(an unpublished poem for forty voices)

Behind the gorgeously feathered façade,
The harsh, unforgiving, pointy finger,
The pitiless, arrogant righteousness
And the endless, needless, heartless striving,
Sits a quaking child, another nithing,
Shivering in his puddle of disgrace.

He is me, and I am he — two facets
Of vulnerable, fearful humanity,
Conjured by the turnings of circumstance:
By turn-away mothers and tired fathers,
By love and lovelessness, by being human,
By faking, and pretending, and holding on.

And so we are frozen, carved in marble,
Torn between contempt and grandiosity —
Pietàs of arrogance and self-regard,
holding the corpses of our broken selves;
That could come to life, if prayers were love,
And loving could help us to learn to bless.

Come my dear friend. I know what ails thee.
Take my grubby hand. We’re one and the same.

© William Ayot
Unpublished: please do not share on the web
**A Nithing is an old Anglo-Saxon word for a nobody, an outcast, someone who is shunned and rejected – literally a nothing.

These poems were read on Module 1: The Nuts and Bolts of Shame October 2021

The Thirteenth Chair

Every night at the Pension Beschämen,
A dinner gong is beaten in the hall
As you berate yourself in the mirror,
Before going out to the rickety lift —
The clattering slide of the latticed door,
That familiar feeling of sickening descent —
Which takes you down to the dining-room,
where your usual table of shame is reserved.

And every evening, exactly on cue,
The same sour faces at the table look up
To register that you have arrived again;
Late, unprepared and improperly turned out,
Exposed in ways that you’ve always dreaded.
While the major-domo, standing to the side —
Showing a perfect level of contempt —
Gestures you, coldly to the thirteenth chair.

And every look of disgust and disdain,
Every raised eyebrow, each curl of a lip,
Is soundtracked by a susurrus of whispers
That presages your public evisceration —
The sharp, wet hiss of their sucked-in breaths,
The puffings of scorn, the revolted growls;
Their half-hidden, half-spoken commentaries
That show they know exactly who you are,
That they have unearthed your tin of secrets.

And there they remain, scouring your soul,
The acid circle of your inner judges,
Scornful, tart and wholly unforgiving,
Clutching their indictments and staring you down.
And though you know that you have outgrown them,
Have learned to bless, to forgive and move on.
You also know that they’ll always be waiting —
Waiting when the gong announces dinner,
Waiting at the table with the thirteenth chair.

William Ayot
Mathern
May 2020
Unpublished: please do not share on the web

Take Her Down

Maria has been shamed so many times
she apologises with her every move.
Something in her cringes as she listens
to the jangled voices, the inner jury,
rigged always to find her wanting.
She lives in the tentative hope of love
and the luscious fear of what love might bring
but when she faces the bedroom mirror
she can see that love’s an exclusive gift
exchanged by the beautiful, not the ugly;
not the fat, the stupid, the disgusting,
the obscene, the dull and the unlovable.

And now she’s naked, in his room again,
in his terrible, smiling, sunlit room;
watching his shadow on the dove-grey carpet
as he moves towards her, snarling again.
His words, once tender, now spill like vitriol
over her breasts and her podgy white belly,
eating their way down to burn out her sex;
empty and wasted at thirteen years old…

You make me want to vomit. You’re a whore.

She wraps herself in a grease-stained kimono,
sparing the mirror too long a sight of her,
and tiptoes down to the kitchen once more
where she soothes herself on midnight ice-cream,
licking her wounds on the back of a spoon.

The Stick and the Stone

It’s not the words that hurt,
it’s looking in the mirror,
The daily call to self-scar or curse,
Meeting the same cold loathing in the eyes
Every day of your diminished life.

That’s when you need to cast around
For the tiny, two-leaved seedling in the soil,
That emerald shoot of determination ―
Forcing its way up, drawn by the light:
Rained on, blown down, trodden in the wreck
But still there, holding on ― a little green god
That pipes up for living, that carols the spirit,
That insists upon life in its every increase;
Blessing all things ― including itself;
Opening its boughs to the wind and the sky,
Plunging its roots into ever-deeper darkness,
Singing into being the great tree of soul.

No, never the words ―
But the daily struggle at the mirror:
The unavoidable seeing of one’s self,
The turning of old scorns into tolerance;
Of tolerance into lenity, of lenity into joy ―
The slow internal alchemy that is love.

William Ayot
Mathern,
May 2020
Unpublished: please do not share on the web

Poems that are unpublished can be entered into competitions and for publication in magazines, but once a poem is shared on the web it is deemed to have been published. So please do not share the unpublished poems.
You may share the published poems, but please mention the poet and the book it is published in.
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