Clean by Scott-Patrick Mitchell
“We are Pyrocene. We are lovers made from bushfire, pouring ourselves on to the other. Kindling. We set off fire alarms. A sky smudged with smoke the window blushes sunset.”
~ It Begins With Burning (An Obituary)
For those who may not know, Scott-Patrick Mitchell is a gem of the Western Australian poetry scene. A seasoned performance poet, Mitchell has toured Australia with their works, won a number of prestigious literary awards, and published several chapbooks. Clean (2022) is their much-awaited full-length collection - and it has certainly been worth the wait.
Divided into three parts, Dirty, The Sleep Deprivation Diaries, and Clean, Mitchell takes the reader by the hand and coaxes them through their journey. The collection was written across a decade of Mitchell’s own experience with addiction and recovery.
Dirty is a slow and faithful unpicking of the stepping stone experiences that lead down into their addiction. The poems here are heavy without being opportunistic. Mitchell uses strategically placed quotes to lead us into some of them. The Mourning Star is a powerful opener that begins with a quote from Alice Miller:
“The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden;
what is forbidden is to write about it.”
The poem itself is the evocative starting point from which the others tumble:
You are an ecological disaster.
All your teeth are falling out.
Because you refuse to speak,
to shout. You fill your veins
with swamp. Let your anger
be the climate, raging.
Other poems in this part explore a sense of hopelessness that circles around growing up in a community where drug use is openly a part of life. The Town and Anti-Pastoral are two distinctly different poems in the way they’re written, but both offer an intense picture of this experience:
“Window ground is a revelation: here is the track addiction carves. Needlecraft a map of becoming lost. As survivors on this road, we are constantly crashing. You wish we were
snakes shucking skin, how this heat swallows everything, fades meat from pink to grey to gone. White ache of salted world. At night, this desert is frozen. We are left wandering.”
Mitchell teases through their experiences, and it would be easy to get lost in the dark here, but they never allow this to happen - they’re with us all the way through and even in this midst, they inject moments of hope and connection precisely when the reader needs it. Night Orchids details a sensual meeting of two individuals with a giddy thrill that is palpable on the page:
Here, we glisten, sacred.
World bows:
if this were a poem
wildflowers would luminescent
road into ribbon,
tied around us.
The Sleep Deprivation Diaries are a collection of journal-entry style poems Mitchell advises were taken from their journals while an addict. An apt quote from Chris Fleming’s On Drugs sets us up well for this new phase we’re about to embark on with the poet:
“Of course, it’s hard to tell how much of this is fiction, or
even whether all of it is.”
Beginning with prayer for the parents of every addict and then a series of entries titled simply Day 1 through to Day 7, which playfully challenge form and language.
“Space of absent-head, elongated place where dreams
lack but cells knot themselves back together as
errors undo into an electrical soothe of circuitry.
esemplastic equation, solidify within
pockmarked skin: wake up real again.”
A strong sense of physicality moves through this section, as it seems Mitchell is both connecting and disconnecting from their body. This provides a fantastic depth of lyricism and evocative imagery.
“Flesh is for the unbuckling.
How, to get up there, you have to float.
Cathedral of your body, elope.
Turn back, see how small I have become.
As if I am insignificance.”
We emerge from The Sleep Deprivation Diaries into the final part of the collection, Clean, which turns its focus towards rehabilitation and therapy. Suitably opened with the poem of the same title, Mitchell walks us through a timeline of getting clean, the demons and pinch-points that chart the way, finally landing:
“After six months you will still be haunted. But at least you’re clean.”
The shift from the erratic style of the journals in the previous section into this bold clarity is fresh and helps the reader to feel this process in a unique way. A blanket of tenderness wraps this part of the collection more so than the previous two parts. There is a sense of stepping back, observing, and weighing up where we land - Mitchell is, in an authentic sense, rewriting some of their experiences and laying them to rest. In Reworking slurs I was called from when I was using, they reframe this trauma for their purpose and, in doing so, reclaim empathy for the self:
“DIE (trying to say every thought at once, once again)
THIEVING (a god particle)
(i am in love with the high places) OF THE EARTH
ALL YOU JUNKIES DESERVE (compassion & a warm bed)”
One of the standout experiences for me when reading through this collection was the sincere sense of reconciliation that Mitchell has arrived at. This is an individual who has seen where the darkest parts of life can take them and instead of being consumed by the trauma, has decided to make peace with it - to harness it in the most beautiful way.
It’s this sense of peace and healing that the reader is ultimately left with, despite the emotional rollercoaster. In an ever-complex world, it’s this fresh reminder that literature can provide us with, and the truth that there is creative beauty to be found in healing. As Mitchell writes in How Joy Arises:
“Because amid it all there is hope. Give gratitude, send love, trust. With tender hands we should use a word like prayer, and we have. Yes, it is another day... like so many you have lived before.
But you are here, now.”
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
