OctPoWriMo Day 14. From the Mouth of Dread (autotomy edit)

OctPoWriMo Day 14. Mutations

In modern poetry, every poetic movement is a mutation of poetic ideas. Each new poetic “school” with its own manifesto redefining what poetry should or could be that made them new and unique, quick to be swallowed up by the next school. Each poet creating variations, mutations to forms, allegories, themes. If poetry does one thing, it changes—mutates—constantly.

Example Poem: “The Superstitious Ghost” by Arthur Guiterman from Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre

The Superstitious Ghost

I’m such a quiet little ghost,
Demure and inoffensive,
The other spirits say I’m most
Absurdly apprehensive.

Through all the merry hours of night
I’m uniformly cheerful;
I love the dark; but in the light,
I own I’m rather fearful.

Each dawn I cower down in bed,
In every brightness seeing,
That weird uncanny for of dread—
An awful Human Being!

Of course I’m told they can’t exist,
That Nature would not let them:
But Willy Spook, the Humanist,
Declares that he has met them!

He says they do not glide like us,
But walk in eerie paces;
They’re solid, not diaphanous,
With arms! and legs!! and faces!!!

And some are beggars, some are kings,
Some have and some are wanting,
They squander time in doing things,
Instead of simply haunting.

They talk of “art,” the horrid crew,
And things they call “ambitions.”—
Oh, yes, I know as well as you
They’re only superstitions.

But should the dreadful day arrive
When, staring up, I see one,
I’m sure ’twill scare me quite alive;
And then—Oh, then I’ll be one!

~Arthur Guiterman

In this poem the poet mutates the meaning of the word “humanist”. How else is this poem a mutation?

Prompt: Think of your deepest fear. Now imagine it is afraid of you. Write your poem from the frightened fear’s point of view. Why does it fear you? What expert would it site to defend its position?

Possible form: Mutate a form. Take any form and make it your own: change the rules—the syllable count, the meter, the rhyme scheme, or any other aspect of the form. Or create your own poetic form.

~

From the Mouth of Dread (autotomy edit)

(intake note: patient = Fear; presenting complaint = “the human keeps naming me”)

I hovered at the edge of night,
a phantom stitched of fear and echoes,
trembling at the thought: you might
seek me out, unmask my shadows.

I hover at the seam of night,
a stitched-wrong hush, a mouth full of pins.
You come with daylight, scalpels of why,
and I rattle like cutlery in my own ribs.

I fear you, yes: your pulse, your spreadsheet,
your tidy verbs that chloroform the dark.
You bring a tape measure to the abyss,
label my teeth, file my howl, audit my spark.

I fear you, yes: you, the living one,
with plots, plans, an appetite for meaning.
I dread the daylight of your reason,

your maps, your logic: they’d pierce me clean.  

You ask, where does it hurt? I point to the attic:
a jar of moths in the lung, a mirror with gums,
half a childhood pinned like a beetle to cork,
a mother’s voice chewing bread and my thumbs.

I quiver at your “why”s, your sharpened tools,
your questions sharper than any ghost-lash.
You'd dissect me — tear open my old wounds,

expose every tremor behind the mask.  

I cite my expert: Dr. Klein’s porcelain wolf,
who taught that love eats and is eaten in turn;
that every cradle keeps a small furnace,
and every kiss carries tongs that burn.

Next: I cite the scholar of night,

Edith Whistmore, “On Fear and Echoes,”
who cautions: curiosity is a blade

that drills the silence from spectral veins.  

You nod. You graph me. You name my dread
“object constancy failure,” “ambivalence split.”
So I molt, leave a fear-skin on your clipboard,
skitter downstairs, barefoot, unfit.

She says fear lives only in unseen places
... but when the seen arrives, it kills the space.
So I, dread incarnate, quake to see your face,

the end of my encrypted grace.  

(progress note: patient reports increased “you-ness”)

Your questions have edges. I lick them. They salt.
You call it “exposure”; I call it the knife
that unseams the pocket where I keep my saints,
their glass eyes, their vinegar, their borrowed life.

I dread your lamp, its white interrogation,
your habit of cleaning the wound with a name.
Once you inventory a darkness, it stops breeding,
and I need my larvae, my industry of shame.

Bion warns: thinking digests the unthinkable.
Kristeva murmurs: abject is mother-salt.
So I hiss like a kettle you forgot on the stove,
throat full of nickels, tongue full of fault.

I am strongest when I am blur.
You make me portrait, frame, museum tag.
How can a hurricane live as a stamp?
How can a sob survive in a bag?

(relapse: midnight returns with meat on its bones)

You will arrive anyway, soft voice, clean hands,
a candle you balance inside my skull.
You will touch the latch of the locked kitchen drawer.
I will twitch. Something scurries. Something dull.

But suppose you arrive anyway,
with soft words, a hand, a candlelit gaze,
I will still quiver. Because I know:

you unravel me, I become known, I dissolve.  

Here is my secret: I fear your mercy.
Cruelty I can metabolize; mercy dissolves me.
When you hold the thing I am without flinching,
my scaffolds unhook. The trap frees the sea.

Better I stay under the sink with the bleach,
feral as forks, faithful as mildew.
Name me and I am carcass. Unname me
and I am weather: inside you, through you.

Better I hide, remain unsaid,
a flicker behind the mind’s curtain.
Let me remain your mutating fear,
for if you catch me... I disappear.

So let me remain your mutating rumor,
bone-marrow moth, moon-pit in the bread.
If you catch me, pin me, warm me with language,
I’ll panic into life, and then go dead.

(discharge summary: prognosis guarded; avoid bright rooms; do not feed with nouns after midnight.)

~ Oizys.

[Process / Field Notes]

I wanted to let fear narrate itself like a therapy transcript, clinical but feral. The grotesque, the psychoanalytic, the domestic all blur, because fear never lives in clean categories. I borrowed the structure of a villanelle but let it decompose: the refrains rot, mutate, repeat wrong. Like memory under duress. The poem feeds on its own neurosis, every stanza is an autopsy table, every metaphor a nervous tic. “From the Mouth of Dread” is the session where the analyst is Reason, and the patient (Fear) realizes that being understood is the ultimate violence. I used “Dr. Klein’s porcelain wolf” as stand-ins for how we cite experts to sanitize terror, theory as ritual. The grotesque imagery (ribs as cutlery, saints in vinegar) isn’t for shock, but to show the texture of dread: tactile, domestic, ordinary. Maybe what I’m saying is: fear doesn’t haunt us; we haunt fear. We keep naming it until it has no skin left. And when the fear finally vanishes, what’s left behind is just us: trembling in the light we thought we wanted.

(diagnosis: improving; prognosis: incurably human.)