Photo of a dirt path with blurred trees in the background.

Andy Jackson

Unalone poems

These poems are shaped by two related, easy-to-forget truths - that our poems (and our lives) depend upon the words of others, and that our limitations hold as much poetry as any of our apparent strengths. In the workshop I ran for Queensland Poetry, I asked participants to write an unorthodox, intuitive self-portrait. I started writing "Self-portrait as hard rubbish", but it was a failure, so I had to write "Abandoned self-portrait as hard rubbish". The poem "Ableism is the pre-existing condition that puts us at risk" is a pandemic cento, which speaks for itself, for ourselves, perhaps for you, but definitely towards you. The other two poems lean into imperfection - they're wandering thoughts offered to two friends, both of whom I've mentored as poets, but have definitely learnt from.

  • I was up to my neck in it before I realised
    the portrait was never going to be
    convincing. I saw myself, askew and unfixable,

    on the narrow verge, felt their furtive eyes,
    their assessing, grimy hands pass briefly
    over me, those merchants of neglect,

    hoarders of quiet loss. I'd even imagined one
    muttering, mid-century design...? not quite...
    before moving on to consider the tired armchair,

    the rickety unfashionable lamp. Come dusk,
    exposed to the damp and pointed air, I'd be
    hauling in the slow rust again. But there

    was too much implied narrative for a poem,
    the images veiled under a film
    of cool pity. And what would I have been

    saying about you, my love, the only one I trust
    to see me entirely naked, you who keeps
    telling me I've no reason to apologise for this body?

  • analysts said people had just gotten tired
    of being careful officials say people will die
    but we say we aren’t dead yet time
    and ventilators are scarce you have no idea

    who might be vulnerable around you we are

    being asked to make enormous, difficult decisions
    so that other people can go to the pub normal
    birthed me yet normal wants to extinguish me
    zoom crip dance parties and contact-free baskets

    of extra veggies – life saving crip mutual aid survival

    I want to believe that the future is
    not just mine but ours am I scared that the hospital
    won’t let me in? every single second when anyone
    says it’s only the old and unhealthy who are dying

    we say stop racist-eugenics now I write

    using us, we and our to represent how this community
    is part of me bad jokes, memes and tacos
    count as mutual aid to not wear a mask is not
    an act of freedom – it is callous it is radical to love

    a body that the world says is wrong


    * Only the title of the poem is mine. Its words come from (in order) Bri M (“Maybe We Shouldn't Go Back to Normal”, The Nation, 30 June 2021), Crip Fund, Alice Wong (“I'm Disabled and Need a Ventilator to Live: Am I Expendable in this Pandemic?”, Vox, 4 April 2020), Anthea Williams (“For Those of Us with Disabilities, Lockdown Won't End as long as Covid Strategies Leave Us Behind”, The Guardian, 31 December 2021), El Gibbs (“People with Disability 'Completely Overlooked' as Omicron Surges”, SBS News, 20 December 2021), Bri M, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (“How Disabled Mutual Aid is Different than Abled Mutual Aid”, Disability Visibility Project, 3 October 2021), Alice Wong, Amy Gaeta (“Disabled Communities in the Covid-19 Pandemic”, Disability Visibility Project, 26 March 2020), Crip Fund, Amy Gaeta, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Anthea Williams, Frances Ryan (“Living in a Woman's Body: this body is a genetic mistake – but it is sex, laughter and beauty too”, The Guardian, 10 February 2022).

  • for Gaele
    I like to think of love as a ribcage without pain – Gaele Sobott, “I like to think of love”


    or as the rush of breeze behind this soft
    applause of reeds at the edge of the deep, modest
    reservoir as I walk awkwardly past,
    needing to push out, head-first, into the living

    water, to make a wake of everything else,
    to stroke and float within the dark blue mirror
    and swim back to the shore drenched

    in reflected sky and a wash of microbes
    who remind me that all time is crip time
    (it's just our economy pretends otherwise).
    But what to make of the way these hands,

    hips and shoulders hold pain without calling it pain?
    Spasm of mirror-neurons. Ache of a world
    in distress. Love, unable to turn away.

  • for Paul
    sometimes it's a wrestle / but usually it's an embrace – Paul South, “Common Burn”


    I'm not a narcissist who thinks this trail
    wasn't here before me, wasn't pressed into being

    by thousands of dirt-poets like us, but I do like to
    pretend I'm alone. It's a relief not to be –

    you remind me. Where was I? Head down,
    I'd tripped into some kind of fugue state – must have

    been the sensory cocktail of struggling eucalypts,
    the descending alarms of choughs

    I couldn't see, those cubes of wombat poo,
    and a gust of wind that had me half in rapture, half

    in dread – when our foreheads met
    with a thunk. We were knocked out

    or woken up, or both, it doesn't matter. The land
    here knows I can't teach you anything

    about lines, how they break, how we stitch
    ourselves together. Only, maybe this

    wrestling of yours – mine too – is also an embrace.
    A poem of staying alive that has no ending

    that would make any sense. That's enough
    of these circuitous metaphors – let's keep rambling...

About Andy Jackson

Andy Jackson is a poet, essayist and creative writing teacher. He has been shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry. Andy has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal, and his latest poetry collection is Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021).Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.