Force Feeding

And into every dream
So that in the most
Outlandish of images
Central to its theme was . . . food

After nineteen foodless days,
The pain of hunger,
This usurper of senses,
Was itself usurped by fear

For some hours since
The dapper doctor announced
That he would return
To force-feed the prisoner

(He later changed this to
‘Artificially feed the patient’),
Fear had feasted
On his self-doubt

From the ballad of his schooldays,
From the archives of his mind,
The spectre of Tom Ashe’s
Force-fed death appeared

The dramatisation
Of the brutal process
By cynical warders
Ate at his imagination

The recitation
Of dangerous possibilities,
The tube entering the lung
‘By mistake,’ of course

But most acute:
The fear of failing
Once the gauntlet
Was thrown down
So when the trolley
Rattled to the cell,
The young man,
Lotus-like on the bed

Faced them, bone naked
To the blanket round his waist,
Talisman of rosary beads
About his neck

The cell key turned
With a clack,
An intrusive
Churning in his gut

Twelve-handed they entered,
In angry flood,
Frothing hospital-white
On incriminating blue

While the doctor
From deep-seated elitism
Affected detachment
In civilian hue

The initial struggle
Was painfully brief,
Boney resistance
Cruelly subdued

Prison stripped
To helplessness
Then stretched
To hopelessness

Under doctor’s orders
Trailed up the bed
With jack-knifed body
To the high end

Hair pulled, head forced back,
Steel, cold to his neck
For a throat to stomach line
That would be straight and true

Fear fought dedication
In the rebel heart
As his breath battled
Through gated teeth

‘Now,’ ordered the doctor
‘Open your mouth!’
And so it began
In clenched mute refusal
Naivety left the naked
To join the clothed
And both discovered the power
Of a spirited ‘No’

Forearm anchored forehead,
Knuckles boring jaw-joints,
Forceps scraping gums,
Ryle’s Tube searing nostrils

The soft membrane
Hot with pain and blood,
Surgeon turned jailer
In prison’s privacy

Jaw muscles are strong
But not strong enough,
Gasping with pain
A vice kills the cry

No time for self-pity
As the clamp is adjusted
To force a tube
Down famine throat

Motionless dread
Fills the pinioned body,
Movement is rebellion
And clinically suppressed

No speech is possible
Nor motion of limbs,
Protest undiluted
In dilated eyes

This is the surreal
Experience of nightmares
Where great fear
Invokes paralysis

The doctor knocks clumsily
At the swing door in the throat:
One way to the stomach
The other to lung-filled death

All of which, the doctor
Hypocratically explained,
Was for his own good,
To save his life

Tom Ashe, Tom Ashe,
Comfort and fear,
A pounding drum,
A temple beat
Then the flap swings right,
The tube rams through
A choking of liquid,
Crowds his shrunken belly

As the pain ebbs
And relief tingles
In sweat beads,
His drowning stomach heaves

With involuntary spasms
A thick white eruption
On chin and chest
And uniforms

Until some clever warder
Wielding a kidney-dish
Collects the dripping remains
Of this expensive fare

Which the doctor described,
Without hint of irony,
As equivalent to
‘A meal at The Savoy’

For his final trick,
With nausea on the wane,
The chef returned the contents
To the prisoner’s stomach

And so it ends for one day
With a hasty exit
Of the tube from the throat
And the squad from the cell

Leaving the Irishman
To clean up the mess,
To recover his dignity
And fret about the many next times

The doctor in charge,
Known by the official title of
‘Principal Medical Officer’,
Was clearly affected by the scene

For the remainder of the hunger strike
He entered the cell
Only after the prisoner
Had been subdued

A man of intellect and eloquence
Who spoke of Arthur Koestler,
Oliver St John Gogarty
And his own flag-waving youth