2. Insomnia and Behavioural Sleep Clinic (2022)

You tell the doctor that you’ve quit sleep. 

How every night, the walls in your house 

speak to you in riddles. When you try to answer,  

they put you on hold like the HMRC helpline — 

it always feels like the silence after laughter,  

a door left ajar during a snowstorm.  

It started when she died that autumn, 

an untreated brain is like blight on tomatoes. 

For ages, your mouth tasted of cardboard. 

Sometimes, you see her face on posters 

of missing people, dotted around London, 

but the real problem is all the apple seeds

that keep falling from the ceiling. 

You ride the bus to Heathrow 

in the early hours of the morning, 

just to hear airplanes taking off without you. 

It says somewhere that most people 

don’t eat in their dreams, but last Monday, 

you ate pickled fruit, tinned cheese, 

your body a boiled pig on stilts. 

You don’t know what any of it means 

but waking up with hives is never a good sign.

A girl throws up black in the vegetable aisle,

then blames you for the mess.

3. Park Royal Mental Health Centre, Pond Ward (2019)

After Matsuo Basho

in the pink walled pond, 

a frog sinks in clozapine

and doesn’t return

the urine-stained chair

breathes in our grief — white coats

cold as morning frost

solitude thickens 

fluorescent lights in the hall

swallow up dead moths

blue veins in full bloom

an undone hospital gown

shivers in the wind

her wails are burning

the roof of her mouth, she sings

like a haunted house

hands cling onto home

like lichen grasping at trees

tomorrow we wait