Well, that didn’t go as planned. I’ll talk about it more later.
Right now I just want to tend to the practice of consistency, embarrassingly neglected throughout the entire year.
A collection of poems I put together a few years ago, from an era of development in which I attempted poetry through prompts and NaPoWriMo, never made it past round one of the chapbook contest in which I entered it. I gave up on writing poetry for a long time after that, but this year one thing I was able to do was get back into it. Out of necessity, of course; therapeutic art is a tool some of us reach for only when we feel like we’re going to die if we don’t do something.
I’m going to make a project of refining this year’s pieces into a new collection, since I enjoyed doing that for my failed chapbook in 2017. It was a project that gave me purpose and I think it’ll be healthy to try again this year, even if I don’t submit it or any of the poems anywhere but here. It was like putting together a mixtape or a playlist, which I have to admit to being pretty fucking good at.
Below are three poems from that first attempt that I think connect not only to each other but also reflect me where I am now; it’s as if time is a spiral and I’m looking back at where I’ve stood before – same but different.
SUBSTANCE DUALISM
Mind and body call across to each other
connected via ancient electrical wire networks
somehow not yet obsolete:
I want it
Well I don’t
Yes you do stop lying
I said no
You’re not in control here
And you are? We’d be long dead
Ditto what you said
PROPHECY
Journal Entry, September 1, 2015
I dreamed that we were over. Something came up… Oh, yeah. I asked him if he loved me and he didn’t say anything. I prodded him to make sure he wasn’t playing, and sure enough, he was done loving me. Just like that. I told him to leave. If he didn’t love me, there was no point to him sticking around. I threw him out. I considered all the minutiae of changing my Facebook status, and wondering what I was going to do now about a car. How the accounts were going to be divided and if I could handle all the bills. It felt real. Humiliating, devastating, leaving me empty. I was ready to cry until he came into the room for bed. I woke, realizing it was a dream. Relief settled in as I told him about it. I asked if he was leaving me. He said no. I asked if he loved me. He said he loves me much. We fell asleep.
THEN I GHOSTED
The words that come up when I think of him, if the haze of crazed doubt and obsession thins out enough to see. Like, I was better off a ghost in his machine. It rattles me to manifest myself to him, to become flesh.
The body is an unstable place. A wet electrical network wound too tightly under a skin that never stops crawling. The nerves over-capacitate and burn me from the inside. He had asked, “WHERE DID YOU COME FROM?” and I shied from answering.
My natural state is air. I took up this form
That I might join it to yours
But it is bathos
For now we have faces
And I want mine erased
The dissolution of relationships is too painful to practice at the frequency it would take to become good at it. And what would “good” look like? Would that mean running through the stages of grief more quickly? Or holding them as they arise messily and out of order, always uninvited. Would it mean inviting the feelings? Letting them sit and chat for a while until they’ve said what they need to say.
I think that might be it.
BLOG OF RHIANNIMATOR 