Love and Other Maladies

By Debby Klein

Love, heartache, loss and other maladies: longing, regret, failure, addictions, madness, suicide, emptiness and ontology. A sprinkling of myth: a twist of irony. A meander across the dark side. An antidote to personal growth and self improvement. The perfect gift for the existentially disappointed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467883849

Debby Klein

Debby Klein has been a playwright, an activist, a counsellor, a cabaret writer and performer, a psychiatric patient and a facilitator. She wrote her first poem aged five but on hitting adolescence her poetry became so morose that for a number of decades she concentrated on comedy instead and with rather more success. She took the plunge back into poetry as a performance poet to take the art of the morose to a whole new level. She is co-founder of Desperate Poets Inc. This is her first published collection.

Book preview

DADDY – TOO

I am not Sylvia Plath

and you were not a Nazi

only a dictator

and a Jew

and God, how I loved you.

And the funny thing is

Is how I never knew.

And while we’re on the theme

of plagiarising other poets

you fucked me up

as parents often do.

You also gave me myself

that’s what I owe you.

All of it. Your pain

absorbed like a sacrament.

The fight to the death

to separate

the fight to survive

your death.

Because what am I

in this life, without you?

ICARUS

Earthbound, stuck in mud

clutching at feathers, the melted wax

stuck to clothes and skin.

The descent was shocking,

the landing hurt like hell

but here I am alive,

that’s something to celebrate,

isn’t it?

I wrench my eyes upwards

and like a painting brought to life

I see you, still circling the sun

way too high. ‘It’s dangerous’, I scream

but you are too far gone to hear

alive to the moment

in love with the Sun God.

You told me we were meant to soar,

you had an angel complex even then.

Damn you, and your dreams

of immortality. Your wings aren’t real,

I know, I’ve seen them close up

but somehow you’re still aloft

while I have crashed, empty and foolish.

It’s all brown down here.

Like some ugly flightless bird,

I flail in my mud bath

and lift my head and wail

remembering what it was like to fly.

Which one of us is saved?

You risked it all and if you plummet

there’ll be no muddy landing

you’ll break into a thousand stars.

Which one of us is saved?

I scan the landscape

for the journey home,

the sun is too painful to look at now.

Be careful Icarus, only a fool

tempts the Gods.

And yet I hear your laugh

full throated and alive with joy,

‘what is life, unless we risk it all!’

I’ve lost you now for good.

It hardly bears thinking about.

Sometimes in corridors and

dismal railway stations

I still hear your laugh.

Still joyful.

Pawn or instrument, I’ve no idea.

‘It does no good to tempt the Gods,’

I tell you, though you don’t reply.

They always have the last laugh.

IT WAS NOT YOU I LOVED

It was not you I loved

but an idea about myself.

A lingering flame

illuminating something wild and strange

on a dark cave wall.

A narcissistic longing

an old refrain.

Beneath your glass roof

awake while you slept

I danced under stars