October 16. A note on cowardly rebellion.

The OctPoWriMo Day 16 prompt included this: Possible form: Speak the poem first – use a tape recorder and just speak until you get all your ideas recorded. Listen back and write down the best lines to form your poem. This is a part of a bigger issue which is why I decided to write and address in a separate post. 

Although, it is a pure coincidence I had been vehemently thinking about this since the past few days and it came up today in OctPoWriMo's prompts. But, guess this is a sign and/or opportunity to finally pen them down. Couple of days ago, I wrote a post called Poem: Body & Coda of “A Colorful Checklist at the Checkpoint” + Prefatory Notes + Auditory Afterword. And many other writings on my cowardly rebellion has been no stranger to this weird weblog of mine.

There are a couple of elements to this predicament. One of them is identity. But, I believe it is too soon right to untangle that cobweb of sticky threads of nothingness creating a complicated network of dust, confusion, obscurity, and depersonalization-derealization. The other element (probably linked to the former one) is my voice. Usage of one's own voice to speak and materialize ideas and then write poetry. This couldn't be more un-me. It is my voice or the lack of the voice that has always rattled me. I remember one piece of writing I wrote about my style of writing where I expressed that how banal and vacuous it is. 

It is true. I rarely speak what I write and write what I speak. There is a chasmic lacuna, a profound and cavernous gap, absence, or void that encapsulated the voicelessness and spinelessness in my writing. The vacuum is the materialization of my deep-seated inability to to speak silenced by a deep, overwhelming void. The inner struggle to profusely spread ink while not being able to articulate my true self which is in itself the most passive representation of the unexpressed emotions or thoughts that create a profound emptiness in their voice. This is the metaphorical reality of my writing and my voice.

Probably why I write so much about the "cowardly rebellion" and explore it's acts of quiet resistance, hidden defiance, and a rebellion born of fear or inaction. Instead of grand, heroic gestures, the cowardly rebel focused on internal struggles, subtle disobedience, or the hidden courage of those who seem passive. The cowardly rebel find home in poems like "A Coward's Prayer" by Ani <3 (This slam poem describes a silent, interior rebellion against an oppressive and cowardly authority figure. The speaker admits to being a "coward" in the face of a tyrant but asserts their moral superiority and inner resolve, rejecting the oppressor's worldview while seemingly complying on the surface.) or "Courage in Cowardice" by Ken Mayers (Mayers' poem addresses the irony of a timid character whose quiet retreat is a form of survival and, paradoxically, a kind of courage. The poem suggests that "courage wears a different face, / And can be found in the strangest place."). 

Many such pieces showcase the tension between the fervent desire to act and the vehement fear that prevents it, so the spotlight is mostly on the individual's inner turmoil. Some poems elevate the steadfast endurance of an individual, contrasting it with performative or loud displays of protest only in words. The power found in perceived weakness, retreat, or silence, reframing them as tactical, wise, or even courageous choices. But, two elements used in such poetry is irony and hypocrisy. These poems often use irony to critique both the powerful who exploit the fears of others and the rebels who ultimately fail to act. If I can add another layer to this element, it will be the dilemma and despair. We should also acknowledge our fearful non-action or non-action performances are cosplayed by privileged to use performative rebellion as a form of protest and standing up to tick off items in their listicle of moral superiority. 

I always look up to or better yet, envy people who speak flawlessly, loudly, unapologetically, unabashedly. Their words flow out of their experiences and runs into my veins. My body tries to adapt itself as it's own. But, I know its not. So, the desire for confidence turns into resentment. No matter even if I rehearse their words, poetry, speeches, confidence alone in my room, I am never able to speak them in my voice. It falters. The muscles in throat can tense up. The lesions on the vocal cords like nodules of shame, polyps of inferiority-complex, and cysts of fear interfere with the vibration of my desire and outcomeize a shaky, unsteady, strained sound that is just a puddle of surge of feelings. The voice is lost somewhere in the sea of oxymoron of "cowardly rebellion".

It has been like that. The voice has been stuck there at the nook beside the fiery imagination of rebellion, always suspicious of performance, mothering the skepticism only to use it as a pretext to self-silence. I sit in that corner which offers seclusion and security of oppressors, making it a conflicted and morally ambiguous space. The voice, the means of externalizing this fire, is paralyzed and confined. So, my own silence, my own inability to break free from the corner's perceived security has become my oppressor and it has become the oppressor of my others who are oppressed. A mind is alight with the passion for rebellion, while the physical self remains in a subservient and protected position, thus creating a state of internal dissonance, where the desire for freedom is stifled by the fear of leaving the safety of confinement. 

A classic metaphor for this internal dissonance is a caged bird. There is absolutely zero literary justification need to expand the metaphor but I will. The mind is the bird itself, alight with the fierce and primal instinct to take flight and claim the vast, open sky. The body is the cage which is a solid, secure, and familiar enclosure that provides protection from the dangers of the outside world. The internal conflict lies in the constant, fearful trill of the bird's song that is a cry for the freedom it longs for but has never truly known while its feet remain tied and its wings clipped by a powerful, self-perpetuating fear of leaving its confinement. The safety of the cage, though oppressive, is a known quantity; the freedom of the open air is unknown and therefore terrifying.

So, my writing is essentially a sustained praxis of methodically psychoanalytical voicelessness. I keep circling that line from today’s prompt: “Speak the poem first… listen back and write down the best lines.” Cute. Efficient. And about as natural to me as sprouting gills. My poems arrive like contraband, smuggled across borders of breath; the checkpoint is always the throat. The bell never rings for me, only the metal detector. Yes, I know: I’ve built a tiny republic out of cowardly rebellion. Whisper-statecraft. Interior coups. I specialize in uprisings with no witnesses and manifestos that never clear customs. When I type, the words comply; when I speak, they unionize and strike. The body refuses to be my courier. It sabotages the shipment with tremor and heat, prints lesions in the larynx like forged visas: nodules of shame, polyps of comparison, cysts of “not yet.”  

The tape-recorder method feels like trespassing in a house I own but never furnished. Still, the prompt sits there like a practical oracle: “Measure with your mouth”. I can’t decide if that’s alchemy or accounting. Either way, it demands inventory and I’ve been dodging audits.

Identity is the customs officer that stamps “subject to search”. Every sentence is detained and questioned: “Who sent you? Who do you represent?” I want to answer: the quiet faction… the loyal opposition of the tongue. But loyalty to silence is still loyalty. Irony is the national anthem. I write about rebels who never leave the basement. I write the gulf between “ought” and “did.” It’s a tidy empire of self-contradiction and I am both its censor and its prize-winning propagandist. The hypocrisy is not incidental; it’s the house style. The bird-in-a-cage metaphor refuses retirement

I keep threatening to grant it a pension; then I hear wingbeats against the bars and renew its contract. The cage is weathered, yes, but also upholstered, someone keeps adding cushions of certainty. I suspect the decorator is me.

But, if I did try it, if I did press record. (Fine: I would hide under a blanket first like a child reading by flashlight.) What would come out won’t a poem, not exactly, more like fog warming its hands on a streetlamp. But inside the fog would be these lines I salvage:

listen, I say to the empty room,
the doorframe is a tuning fork; it rings when I breathe wrong.
I am fluent in edits, illiterate in air.
every truth I swallow earns me interest in silence.

I am paying the minimum due. 

When I would play it back, my voice would sound like someone else’s hallway. That’s when I would realize (ALL OVER AGAIN): I have been trying to perform a throat I don’t live in. The act is excellent; the tenancy is month-to-month. 

So, I hugely distrust my voice. My unreliable voice. My impudently aloof voice. My evasive, contemptuous, indifferent, dismissive voice that gives me the cold shoulder, turns its back on me, walks away from the conversations, and stonewalls my rebellion. And, as an counteract, I pretend that distrust is depth. I pretend that tape cares about my myth of incapacity. 

And yes, before you ask, I know the fix. I know the gospel: “Open your mouth. Record. Transcribe. Revise.” I know it the way a locked door knows the shape of the key. Knowledge does not equal passage. Here’s the ordinary audit I keep failing. Assets: Imagery, analysis, stamina, ridiculous devotion to metaphors that should’ve retired three drafts ago. Liabilities: Air. Air. Air. (And a suspicious surplus of self-surveillance.) Notes: The auditor is me; the handwriting belongs to fear; the signature belongs to nobody. When I try to speak a poem, my breath insists on choreography: it wants counts and cues and certified exits. It wants a fire drill, not a fire. The mouth (BLESS IT) wants to be a museum docent: “To your left, a feeling. Please don’t touch.” Meanwhile the page is a smuggler’s cove, dim and loyal; it keeps my contraband thoughts salted and safe. No wonder I keep worshipping the misdemeanor. Let me be ugly-honest: I’ve built a theory to excuse the tremor. I call it the ethics of reticence. It goes like this: If I speak, I might be wrong in public; if I write silently, I am wrong in private, which is cleaner and can be composted into craft. (So, look at me while I greenwash cowardice.)

And yet, and yet, the prompt is a dare that knows my legal name. Press record. Measure with the mouth. My first reaction was to lawyer up. My second was to duck under that blanket (hello, flashlight, old friend) and risk it anyway. Spoiler: the voice that arrived did not knock. It leaked. It had the temperature of embarrassment. It sounded like someone else’s hallway with my shoes on the mat. What came out first wasn’t language; it was weather. Mist. Interference. Then phrases condensing on the streetlamp of impulse: the doorframe is a tuning fork; it rings when I breathe wrong // I am fluent in edits, illiterate in air // every truth I swallow earns me interest in silence // I am paying the minimum due. They’re not heroic lines. They’re receipts. The mouth keeps such excellent bookkeeping of shame. 

Here is the part I didn’t want to write (but this diary behaves like a blood test; it tattles): the voice is not neutral. It has been colonized. Every time I open it, a committee convenes: posture coach, rhetoric cop, protector, saboteur, child who learned that quiet is the one-size-fits-all armor. They vote unanimously to table the motion. “Next meeting, perhaps.” Minutes recorded. Meeting adjourned. Poem postponed. No wonder I fetishize the cowardly rebellion. It’s governance I can run without a quorum. Secret bylaws. Secret ballots. Everyone wins because no one shows up. But the tape does not care about my secret parliament. The tape is procedural. It says: Begin. So I tested a new praxis: not “Speak the poem,” but “Let the body speak around the poem.” What does that even mean? It means narrating the physics, not the thesis.

I said: “The tongue is a reluctant bridge.”

I said: “The throat keeps customs hours; it hates my paperwork.”

I said: “My ribs are a reluctant cave choir; they will not sync.”

I said: “I want a bell; I’ve brought a fork.”

Somewhere in there the bird-in-the-cage started heckling. Of course it did. It’s on retainer. But the heckle sounded different... tired, maybe. I suddenly saw the upholstery I’d added to the cage (pattern: certainty, piping: sarcasm). Suddenly, I was embarrassed not by fear, but by taste. Imagine being caught decorating your own confinement like a boutique prison. Mortifying. So I tried a micro-mutiny: not an aria, (DON'T BE RIDICULOUS) just a check-in with the body without asking it to perform. I borrowed a tactic from those mindfulness apps I pretend to despise: “Name five things you can hear.” Fine. Fan. Street vendor. Fridge gossiping about ice. A neighbor’s laugh tumbling down the stairwell like loose change. None of these sounds cared if I sounded “like me.” And for one detached second, I realized: the voice I’m guarding is a brand, not a person. No wonder I can’t wear it in public; it’s dry-clean only.

Let me file another uncomfortable report: I envy the loud. Yes, I said it earlier. Here’s the update. I don’t just envy their confidence; I envy their waste. The luxury of being imprecise out loud and trusting repair later. The confidence that a messy sentence won’t cancel the speaker. They burn fuel I hoard. Then they get where they’re going. I’m here, calculating mileage for a trip I never take. And yet (third yet, final yet, the yet that unlocks something): there is a species of courage that looks exactly like clerical work. Not the banner, not the bullhorn, but the minutes. Press record. State the date. Read the roll. Approve the previous fear. New business: one breath that lands. Old business: the same doubt, but let’s not grandstand it this time. Action items: pick one line from the fog and let it live with the windows open.

So, in the spirit of consequences and not just commentary, I acknowledge my radical suspicion. I notice the way I sit like I am about to be graded. I never name the room. I never read sentences you already wrote. Out loud. When the shake arrives, I interpret it. And I romance it. Like it is a metaphor. I try to salvage one line you didn’t expect to go bad and quickly put it in the logbook before the critic wakes up. So, I stop before you get good at it. My "best lines" are never the cleverest ones but they are the ones that survived contact with oxygen. And, every poetry, word, entry I write here feels like a contraband parcel smuggled past the throat’s checkpoint. And, the poem is the checkpoint, and passing is always the goal. Presence is not. For now, I will keep my republic of whispered coups if I must while I hope that if I relapse into the upholstered cell (HOPE I WILL) at least I’ll have left a light on. Not an anthem. A pilot. The kind that burns small and steady, even when you’re certain you’ve turned everything off.

The mouth shall be used for experiments, not proofs.

The voice is leased, not owned, and defaults are not moral failures.

Lines that tremble count as lines.

Breath gets to be a verb.

(Context for future-me: This riffs off the Oct 16 prompt: apostrophe, the tape-recorder gambit, the domestic haunting. It’s a continuation of that mango-and-kettle scene, except the ghost this time is the microphone itself. If I keep doing these mouth-first drills, maybe the “cowardly rebellion” graduates from interior sabotage to exterior practice: less spectacle, more stamina.)

~ Oizys.