OctPoWriMo Day 28. The One with Iron Fingernails

OctPoWriMo Day 28. The Monsters We Make

We’re getting close to the end of this wonderful journey. We’ve explored sensory detail, gone deeper connecting sensory detail with personal thought and memory, and then deeper connecting sensory detail with personal thought and memory and universal themes and symbolism. So today, let your persona take you even deeper, freeing you to explore the fears you’ve been avoiding. Let him or her sit with the discomfort and free you to write what you see, feel, want or don’t want. Let her or him ask the deep questions that you haven’t yet felt safe to ask.

Example Poem: “Neurotics” by Philip Larkin from Collected Poems(Aal)

Neurotics

No one gives you a thought, as day by day
You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.
None think how stalemate in you grinds away,
Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high
To bite on earth. The mind, it’s said, is free
But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

So year by year your tense unfinished faces
Sink further from the light. No one pretends
To want to help you now For interest passes
Always towards the young and more insistent,
And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends
Your long defense against the non-existent.

~Philip Larkin

Prompt: Sculpt a protector with your words. What does it look like? Send it out to fight a fear, to get your revenge.

Possible form: A Ballad

~

The One with Iron Fingernails

(ABCB rhyme — loose iambic tetrameter / trimeter)

I carved him from my sleepless hours,

steel ribs and burning bone;

I stitched his jaw with thunderclouds—

to guard me when alone.

His eyes were coins of river glass,

unspent, unsold, unowned;

he learned the map of every fear

my shaking hands had shown.

I sent him to the door of dreams

where childhood monsters breed;

he tore their velvet masks apart

and fed on what they’d bleed.

He marched into my office halls,

where deadlines hissed like snakes;

he crushed their clocks to silver ash

and gave me back my breaks.

He cornered all the whispered doubts

that said I’d fail again;

he pinned them by their paper tongues

and wrote my name as “when.”

Yet gently, he returned at dawn

and placed his helm aside;

“You don’t need me,” he told my chest,

“but I will walk beside.”

So now he stands behind my thoughts

when sorrow tries to speak;

his iron fingernails click slow...

a promise, not a threat, to keep.

~ Oizys.