Don’t let your sleeves slip down
We are making space. Emptying the cupboards, forming neat little piles. We don't know what we will do with the space yet, but we have a good idea. It’s important to make changes, to make space for a new beginning. Wheel that out of here.
This machine, this machine with cuffs and wires and tubes, it is used for strangling your limbs to stop bleeding. Throw it away. That television screen, you can use that to look deep inside of yourself, you can see your dreams, floating uneasily among the small intestine. Push it out the window.
Fill that lift up with blood, every drop. Fill the other lift up with stuffed toys, cram them in there until their glassy eyes burst. That cabinet there, that’s where we’ll keep the cans of oxygen. The cabinet next to it, with the padlock on, thats where the weekends are being stored.
We will need to undo our work, eventually. But we cant worry about that now, the future is outside. We have glued some of the doors shut, but we won't say which ones. The lights have been dimmed, but only in the wrong places. The sink is filling up with ice. Nail down the alcohol. Nail down our clothes. Shower until your skin screams.
The future is outside, barking like a dog.
Inside the children’s day case unit
I dreamt of my first love laughing on the swings.
Then I dreamt of my other first love, she had hand tattoos now. Unlike her. They were terrible but I admired the effort. The commitment.
I dreamt of gardens, fresh paint, amateur theatre nights staging wobbly productions of Henrik Ibsen’s ‘enemy of the people’, and screaming at the emotions for not making themselves visible.
I dreamt of someone else now, they are putting their cold pale leg over me again. Is it just as good as it was the first time? A re-do?
I dreamt, but lazily. My landlord lay in a pool of blood and I dug a hole in the garden.
And then the cars caught fire. I dreamt of every car on fire. White Hyundais, grey Mercedes, purple and black Mazdas, all burning intensely next to the ambulance bay.
I woke up to the swollen and bleeding insides of a mistake. Another Re-do.
I dreamt about America, the shaking 1950’s, the steaming 1920’s. Everyone wasted everything eventually, and nobody can satisfy their dads.
I dreamt of hot trolleys every day. Wet hair. Wheels.
I dreamt of a small church, Dr Stockman, and his wife Katrine are on stage. ‘You are in a library’, I tell them, ‘in your own home, and there is glass everywhere, ransacked shelves and drawers, people are screaming outside and throwing rocks through the windows’, I stress this, I tell them to understand ‘that it doesn't matter that you are right, that you know deep down that you are correct’, I say to them, I beg them, ‘you should be frightened for your life’.
These poems and photos were taken from April 2020, written in between night shifts during the height of the pandemic. Ed Jarrett was (and is) working as a healthcare assistant in the operating theatre in a children’s hospital. He is a prose poet, based in Brighton, and his work has appeared online in Datableed and in the 87 press’s The Hythe.
