Poetry: What Healing Sounds Like By Steve Finbow

I

 

Monday.

A note left on the toaster, between burnt crumbs: 

Don’t let the voices win.
I hadn’t heard them in three weeks.

 

Tuesday.
I passed the man again.
Same long coat, same blank stare, 

same mumbling into the collar. 

He doesn’t smell like fear — 

more like stale coins and copper regret.
Something in his pocket glinted. 

Something watched.

I watched back.

 

Wednesday.
I didn’t sleep.
A door slammed two streets away. 

I catalogued each sound — 

the click of the mains, 

the ache of the fridge, 

the twitch-slam of my pulse.
I reread her letter. 

She said: There’s no grace in survival. Only friction.
I filed that one under "truths to burn later."

 

Thursday.
I followed him.
Through Camden alleys, past noise tattooed on the walls. 

The city speaks like a poet drunk on wires.
He dropped a card — folded, deliberately. 

It said: You are not the only one.
I licked the ink. It tasted like static and nettle tea.

 

Friday.
I didn’t cry.
I scraped the kettle clean. 

I stared at the kitchen tiles until they confessed.
She called again, her words filtered through moths. 

She said: It wasn’t your fault, except maybe the part where you stayed.
I asked her to repeat it. 

She hung up.

 

Saturday.
The man bled.
Not visibly, but with a sigh that opened the sky like a wound.
I wrote down every word he never said.
I lit them one by one and inhaled the ash.
I almost remembered how to sleep.

 

Sunday.
I didn’t.
My fingernails drew maps I couldn't read. 

The walls excreted secrets, 

the ones you already told me.
I ate the last of the fortune cookies, 

the ones you left unbroken.
I finally asked the question: 

What does healing sound like when your bones are tuned to ruin?

No one answered.
But the toaster hissed something close to a scream.

 

II

 

Monday. The toaster screamed. Not hissed. 

Screamed. 

I unplugged it. 

It kept speaking. 

The note was gone, replaced by a smear that read: They know you turned it off.

 

Tuesday. He’s multiplying. I saw three of him — 

different alleys, same coat, same muttering. 

Only one looked at me. 

His eyes weren’t hollow anymore. 

They were mirrors. 

And I didn’t like what they showed.

 

Wednesday. The fridge was crying. 

A low whimper that aligned perfectly with my breathing. 

I tried not to sync, but the room had ideas. 

Her letter pulsed. 

The ink bled outward. 

It said: You were right to stay. That way we could find you.

 

Thursday. 

I became surveillance. 

Everything I saw translated into numbers: 

Man = 4. Whispers = 11. Fear = 12. Me = 404. 

He dropped another card. 

It read: Let them hurt you. That’s the access code. 

I didn’t lick this one. I burned it with a stare.

 

Friday. 

My skin stopped syncing with my bones. 

Movement feels like theft. 

I called her. 

The moths were louder. 

She didn’t speak. 

She breathed. 

The breath cracked in four places — 

past, apology, forgetting, future. 

I tried to map the sound. 

The paper tore itself.

 

Saturday. 

The man howled. 

Not with signals, but light. 

His shadow spread like vernix caseosa on a hospital mattress. 

I followed it. It led nowhere. 

It kept leading. 

I think I’m still walking.

 

Sunday. 

I didn’t arrive. 

The flat was different — 

cleaner, but somehow infected. 

My packets of Love Heart had multiplied. 

They all read: You are not yourself. You are his echo. 

I turned on the toaster. It grinned.

 

III

 

Monday. 

The kettle rebooted itself. Boiled nothing. 

Its whistle mimicked her laugh — 

low, delayed, slightly corrupted. 

I wrote it down phonetically: Ehh-hehh...ehh-hehh. 

Then the handle convulsed. 

My fingerprints vanished.

 

Tuesday. 

The smoke alarm sang. 

Not a warning — a lullaby. 

Lyrics half-dismembered, half-elided. 

Her voice layered over synthetic choirs. 

It said: Sleep inside the signal. We made room. 

I curled beneath the blinking LED 

and did not sleep.

 

Wednesday. 

The radiator clicked in Morse. 

I decoded: She was never gone. Just refracted. 

Memory stuttered — 

I saw her kneeling in the corner, 

feeding cables into her mouth. 

The wallpaper peeled to watch. 

I let it.

 

Thursday. 

The clock rewound itself. 

Hours bled backwards, 

but my body moved forward. 

I tripped over a second that hadn’t happened yet. 

She called — no device. 

Her breath emerged from the pantry, 

sweet with rot. 

She asked: Do you remember my name? 

I didn’t. 

But my left hand twitched, 

spelling something in whorls.

 

Friday. 

The oven showed footage. 

Its interior light flickered scenes: 

her spine bending, 

her pulse mapped onto power grids, 

her voice asking: How did you taste when you were real? 

I fed it my silence. 

It began to burn.

 

Saturday. 

The extractor fan spoke in seizure tongues. 

A rapid staccato of grief, coded like epilepsy. 

I convulsed to match. 

My ears rang in her pitch: You are the relapse. Not the recovery. 

I pressed my face to the tiles until language stopped.

 

Sunday. 

The flat looped. 

I opened the front door to the same room. 

The bed was a gurney. 

The cutlery chatted in dialects I don’t own. 

She sang through the electricals now — 

Don't fear the malfunction. It's just your shape. 

I unplugged everything. 

The walls melted into my voice.

 

IV

 

Monday. 

The blood rethreaded itself. 

Slower this time — 

thick, deliberate, almost ceremonial. 

Each vein hummed in her cadence: 

stuttered lullaby, postmortem Morse. 

My heart blinked. 

It spelled If you forget me, we remain. 

I tried not to read.

 

Tuesday. 

The cortex looped. 

Thoughts ran like corrupted film — 

overexposed, twitching at the edges. 

Her memory hijacked the occipital lobe. 

I saw her bathing in phosphorus. 

She murmured: Synapse is scripture. 

And then she vanished — into light, into ache.

 

Wednesday. 

My nerves recited her voice. 

Each impulse a sermon. 

She said: I am the scar beneath your forgetting. I grow when you speak. 

I bit my tongue. 

My lips shattered — 

not from pressure, 

but recognition.

 

Thursday. 

The cerebellum wrote dreams I didn’t ask for. 

She danced on a Möbius wound. 

I asked for silence. 

She gave me echo. 

I cried through my pores. 

Sweat tasted like ink.

 

Friday. 

The spleen misfired. 

It tried to purge her — 

but grief has no antigen. 

My bones inscribed apologies I never learned. 

Inside the marrow: her laugh, looping like prayer.

 

Saturday. 

Cells turned inward. 

Mitosis rewrote my name as hers. 

I forgot walking. I forgot verbs. 

I remembered the smell of her migraine. 

She said You loved me as symptom, not cure.

 

Sunday. 

My breath returned through seizure. 

I convulsed once more.

Each spasm a wound of memory, 

each inhale dredged from the nucleus of forgetting. 

She whispered through the hippocampus: 

Now you’re ready to feel me again.

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Finbow’s poetry features in Big Bridge, Creatrix, nth position, Ragged Lion Journal, Word For/Word, and other publications. His book Polaroid Haiku, with photographs by Jukka Siikala, blends poetry and visual art. Finbow worked as an editor for Allen Ginsberg and wrote a critical study of the poet for Reaktion’s biography series. His other books include – Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia (2014 and 2024), Notes from the Sick Room (2017), Death Mort Tod (2018), The Mindshaft (2020), The Life of the Artist Niccolò di Mescolano (2023), and The Disorder Diaries forthcoming from Iff Books in 2026.