Editor’s Choice

Old bones

    Irene’s aneirene

     by Murray Alfredson

There never was a cure, nor ever would be.

Whether from too much flood of dopamine

secreted in the brain, or from receptors

over-active in the neurone walls,

I do not know — it brought on terror-visions

and dreary voices planting or robbing thoughts.

Phenothiazines served at times to dam

those terrors back, but again and yet again

they struck.  Those drugs, though, left her tongue

for ever wiping over teeth.  And somewhere

within she had the power to accept

whatever came.  Her deep achievement? — in spite

of schizo-scourge she lived out life and died

with crumbling bones.

© 2012  Murray Alfredson

Murray Alfredson has worked as a librarian, lecturer and in Buddhist chaplaincy. He is a prize-winning poet, has published essays and poems in Australia, England, and America, and a collection, ‘Nectar and light’, in Friendly Street new poets, 12, Adelaide: Friendly Street Poets and Wakefield Press, 2007.