PTSD / IET Guidance Notes for Registered Electricians
Too many residual memory devices
Trip again, over and over
Breaking circuits with synaptic transmission
Neurons activating Molotov cocktails
She says: Love yourself
Be kind to yourself
You’ve been through so much.
Cut yourself some slack
But it’s hard to love
a burnt-out fuse box
a mess of tangled wires
shorting, sparking, frayed.
Bare-footed
she turns off the mains supply
and before we tentatively start work
we touch the radiator pipe with our fingertips to ground us.
Jamie Woods started writing poetry while recovering from Leukaemia and PTSD. His poems have been in Poetry Wales, Marble Broadsheet, and the Hippocrates 2021 prize anthology. ‘Only Ever One Summer’ collects 30 ‘sketched’ poems and is a free download from www.jamiewoods77.com.