Tuesday Poem - 'New undergraduates tour the psychology clinic' by Melinda Smith

New undergraduates tour

the psychology clinic

This is the room where the troubled come to be untroubled

This is the room for the opening of mouths in pain

This is the room for picking lightly at the scab on the deep wound

This is the room of dignified gibbering

This is the room of the short fuse

This is the room for the vomiting of memory;

for the smearing of consequences, the flinging of blame

This is the room which was once in darkness, with a velvet curtain

                                                                    and a wooden grille

This is the room of stripping

of disembowelling

of the scooping out and spreading of glistening innards

This is the room of fear of silence

This is the room of too much truth, and not enough

This is the room of fear, of silence

This is the room of the rushing and botching of reconstructive

                                                                                      surgery

This is the room for the impersonation of friendship

and the purchase of listening

This is the room of the drinking of too much water

and of jiggling in the low chair and of the dogged crossing of legs

This is the room for the rewriting of diaries

This is the room of the long clenching

This is the room of rocking without sound

This is the room for the binding of deep wounds with gauze

                                                                                    bandages

This is the room for the closing of mouths in pain

This is the room where the unhealable come to be unhealed

I was well contented to have the chance to be at Melinda Smith's La Mama gig in Melbourne recently, and because of Ken Smeaton's excellent filming of poets' project, it exists out on youtube if you care to partake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtYzXrwmRqc&feature=share

Melinda's book Drag Down To Unlock Or Place An Emergency Call (Pitt Street Poetry) is one of those books that you really want to read, and then read again. A true cut and come again book. And the judges of the Prime Minister's Award agree with me because it won last year's prize. (And it is a prize that is worth winning.) Melinda is a poet to watch, and I am already on the qui vive for the next book. What a wonderful poet she is, and a tip top reader, and a hell of a good person to kick around town with.

http://pittstreetpoetry.com/melinda-smith/