NaPoWriMo 2026 [31st March: Early-Bird Prompt]
Get set...
It’s March 31, or as we like to call with around here, Na/GloPoWriMo Eve. A time when poetic spirits haunt the land, preparing for their month of fun…
Tomorrow, we’ll have for you our first daily resource and featured participant, as well as a daily prompt. In the meantime, here’s an early-bird prompt for those of you whose geographic relationship with the international date line means that April 1 arrives a bit earlier than it does at National/Global Poetry Writing Month HQ.
Start by reading Katie Naughton’s poem, “Debt Ritual: Oysters.” Now, write your own poem in which you refer to a specific writer or artist (or work of literature/art) and make a declarative statement about want or desire. Set the poem in a particular, people-filled place, like a restaurant, bus station, museum, school, etc.
Happy writing!
-
Note: I almost did not write today. But that seems to be the theme lately. Almost doing things, almost showing up, almost being present, almost doing it. So I am interrupting that pattern, even if only slightly. This is for the early-bird prompt.
-
Receipt, or Something Like It
At a small restaurant
with metal tables that remember too many elbows,
I sit across from conversations that are not mine.
Plates arrive, leave, return half-eaten—
like decisions people could not fully commit to.
Someone laughs too loudly behind me.
Someone is breaking up near the window.
The waiter writes quickly,
as if speed could prevent anything from spilling over.
I think of Sylvia Plath,
and how she made even hunger sound precise.
I wanted that.
As a child.
Not the tragedy.
Not the spectacle people romanticize afterwards.
But the sharpness.
I wanted language that did not hesitate.
I wanted to say what I mean
before it rot inside me.
The spoon hits the glass beside me;
a small, accidental declaration.
I wanted to respond on time.
Not hours later,
not days later,
not in the quiet safety of a page,
but there,
in the moment the boundary is crossed.
At the next table,
someone says “it’s not that serious,”
and everyone nods like agreement is easier than truth.
I wanted to disagree.
The bill arrives.
Numbers arranged neatly
as if everything can be accounted for.
But there is always something unpaid,
something carried out
without being written down.
I leave before finishing my food.
I want to stop leaving things unfinished.
Outside,
the evening is loud with people
who seem to know exactly where they are going.
I stand there for a moment longer than necessary.
I want to belong to my own decisions.
And for once,
I do not take that statement back.
~ Oizys.
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [31st March: Early-Bird Prompt] - Receipt, or Something Like It
The Ending of 31st March 2026.
31st March 2026, 20:20 PM
I could not write. I could not write so, so much. So much that has happended and nothing that has happened. Ever since I wrote the previous update, I have been involved politically (joining groups for research and writing, however much I can manage) while my personal life passes by and existential exhaustion plunders the soil of my nature and my surroundings suck the life out of me. The last update was written after my mother left for a trip. And I kept thinking while I was writing that I would use this limited time and extra space to write more and more. But, alas! Anyway, not much value in mourning for voluntarily lost time of writing, right? Unless you are able to extract some gold mine-level write-up from it.
On Sunday, I finally got a haircut, and my mother, who accompanied me, happily teamed up with the hairdresser to rail me to go to a doctor. How do I escape? was the question in my head. One of the reasons I do not like going to doctors, hairstylists, etc. There is a deep, physical connection in those services when we seek them that destroys me because they get to peek under the carpet and point at my rot. I feel crippling shame. Anyway, as usual, I thought that finally, after so long, after so much procrastination and a tumultuous phase of chronically diseased, long, thin, malnourished, constantly falling hair, if I go get a haircut, that will completely change my life, and I will fix all my issues. No. That did not happen. I think a day before this, or two, I kept feeling like my random bouts of the screams in my maladaptive daydreams from those mass-hysteria-like scenarios in my head felt as if some goddess had possessed me, like there was something beneath my skin. I felt this itch to take my skin off to remove that so that constant screaming & triggering in my head would stop. Today, before I started writing this, it popped off. It had been a while since it had popped off; some oozed the day before my mother left. But today, my sister kept poking, needling, scratching, and scrapping me. And it just came out. One can go on smiling, ignoring, and remaining silent only so much in the face of taunting, humiliation, and micro-acts of physical aggression. And they think the violence will never come back and wet their feet, so when it does, they conveniently act surprised and defensive so they can put their manipulative mask on and spin it on you.
But lately, I have been thinking about it, how I am always so late, so tardy when it comes to reacting to violence. How much manipulation is required to suppress your natural, rightful, justified reaction to humiliation? I often think how all that repressed degradation gets lodged in the body like sediment in a river that once flowed freely but now chokes on its own stillness. It does not disappear. No, you think, if you laugh it off or ignore it, it disappears. No. It ferments while it waits so it can find strange, inconvenient exits through trembling hands, sudden bursts, and exhaustion that feels older than your years during the most important or the most embarrassing moments in life. And then, when it finally spills, everyone looks at you as if you are the rupture, not the pressure that built beneath. I keep circling back to this question: what would it mean to respond on time? Not too early, not too late... but exactly when the boundary is crossed. There is a kind of dignity in that immediacy, I think. A clean line. But I was not trained for clean lines, purposefully. I was trained for endurance, for silence stretched thin enough to look like grace. It is a part of the manipulation scheme. And so the body becomes the archive of every insult cataloged, every small violence indexed, and every swallowed word preserved like a fossil. No wonder it screams sometimes and it always wants out, so it itches you from beneath your skin. There is also this strange duality I cannot shake off... how I can spend hours thinking about policy, law, justice, and systems of power and yet feel utterly powerless within the four walls of my own home. Public is clarity, but private is chaos. To such a point that it almost feels fraudulent. Or maybe that’s the point? That the personal is not separate, that all these systems I analyze so neatly are rehearsed, miniaturized, and enacted daily in spaces that never make it to paper.
And still, amidst all this, there is this quiet, stubborn part of me that wants to write. Not to perform, not to impress, but simply to write it all here. To take all this formless heaviness and press it into language, even if the shape, grammar, and punctuation are imperfect; even if it leaks. Maybe that is the only way I know how to resist disappearance. Tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever I gather enough steadiness again, I will return to the questions I have taken up. It all feels connected somehow. The absence of data, the absence of acknowledgement, and the absence of timely response. They may exist on different scales, but they form the same pattern. For now, this is enough. I showed up to the page, even if late. Maybe that counts for something. Maybe that is where it begins again.
After the pop-off session, there was a long bawling session which happened after a long time. Then, I attended one seminar while I cleaned my bed and changed the sheets. The seminar was coming to an end, another meeting of a voluntary group came up. I remember how I had strategically avoided the last one because my inferiority complex had orchestrated and schemed it. But, the bawling session may have released something in me, so I just joined and caught up with the work and started the research. I ate my dinner although a toxic part of me was trying to seduce me into starvation. And after everyone went to sleep, I also nourished my body with some sweets and raw mango and then snacks.
My eyes still feel scratchy so I am pulled towards the bed. But, a couple days ago, I remembered that NaPoWriMo is arriving soon, so I had kept my eye to catch the early bird prompt and kickstart. But, now that I am almost done with the day and I still have work pending from my primary job, I am pushing myself to complete this entry, then complete the NaPoWriMo early bird prompt and then complete my leftover work and go to sleep. It is so calm and silent right now. Summer is slowly arriving. So the windy evenings and nights are back. The windows are slightly open, and the wind keeps slipping in like it knows this room better than I do. There is something about these nights (when the world outside quiets just enough) that makes everything inside louder, but also, strangely, more bearable...? The fan hums, the makeshift curtains breathe, and for once, nothing is demanding anything from me. There is no demand of performance, reaction, justification. Just this soft, in-between space where I can exist without being watched. It is almost ironic how the day was all rupture and noise, and the night has stretched itself into something so gentle. As if the world, after dragging me through its rough edges, is now offering a small apology in the form of wind. I keep thinking about the body again. How it cried today... fully, without negotiation. That does not happen often nowadays and I have also wondered about it that did I lose my ability to go off entirely as a part of "growth". Usually, now my grief is filtered, controlled, delayed. But today it just came, raw and unstructured, like before, like it refused to follow the same old rules. Maybe that is also a form of reclaiming time? Responding, even if late, but still responding. And maybe I have been unfair to myself when I call it “late.” Because what if it was never lateness, but survival? What if the body knew exactly when it was safe enough to let things surface? What if all these delayed reactions are not failures, but carefully timed releases? I don’t know. I am still suspicious of such kindness towards myself. It feels undeserved, almost like I am letting myself off the hook too easily. But then again, who put me on that hook in the first place?
Somewhere between the seminar, the meeting, the food, the crying, and now this quiet writing, I can sense a small shift... not dramatic or life-changing, but it is still a bit noticeable like a knot loosening just a little, little enough to breathe. The NaPoWriMo prompt is still waiting. My pending work is still waiting. Tomorrow will come with its own set of expectations, frictions, negotiations. But right now, in this pocket of time, I am not behind. I am not failing. I am simply here and I am writing, finishing something I started, not abandoning it midway like I often fear I will. That should count. It has to count. Because if I keep dismissing these small completions, these quiet acts of showing up, then I will always feel like I am living in fragments, never in anything whole. Maybe wholeness is not some grand, uninterrupted state. Maybe it is exactly this... broken hours stitched together by moments of honesty. And tonight, I was honest about the rage, shame, exhaustion, the strange, persistent will to keep going anyway. That has to mean something. Right? The wind is getting cooler now. The night is deepening. My eyes are heavy, but not in that suffocating way, more like a gentle pull, like sleep is inviting rather than dragging. I think I will let it, not as an escape, but as a pause. Tomorrow, I will return again to the writing, to the research, to the questions that refuse to stay quiet, to the accountability, to the gaps, to the attempt of making something visible where everything is designed to remain hidden. And maybe, slowly, I will also learn to return to myself on time.Or at least, closer to it. For now, this is complete. 31st March 2026 ends after the noise, with a window open, a body slightly lighter, and a page that did not remain empty. That feels enough.
~ Oizys.
I could not write. I could not write so, so much. So much that has happended and nothing that has happened. Ever since I wrote the previous update, I have been involved politically (joining groups for research and writing, however much I can manage) while my personal life passes by and existential exhaustion plunders the soil of my nature and my surroundings suck the life out of me. The last update was written after my mother left for a trip. And I kept thinking while I was writing that I would use this limited time and extra space to write more and more. But, alas! Anyway, not much value in mourning for voluntarily lost time of writing, right? Unless you are able to extract some gold mine-level write-up from it.
On Sunday, I finally got a haircut, and my mother, who accompanied me, happily teamed up with the hairdresser to rail me to go to a doctor. How do I escape? was the question in my head. One of the reasons I do not like going to doctors, hairstylists, etc. There is a deep, physical connection in those services when we seek them that destroys me because they get to peek under the carpet and point at my rot. I feel crippling shame. Anyway, as usual, I thought that finally, after so long, after so much procrastination and a tumultuous phase of chronically diseased, long, thin, malnourished, constantly falling hair, if I go get a haircut, that will completely change my life, and I will fix all my issues. No. That did not happen. I think a day before this, or two, I kept feeling like my random bouts of the screams in my maladaptive daydreams from those mass-hysteria-like scenarios in my head felt as if some goddess had possessed me, like there was something beneath my skin. I felt this itch to take my skin off to remove that so that constant screaming & triggering in my head would stop. Today, before I started writing this, it popped off. It had been a while since it had popped off; some oozed the day before my mother left. But today, my sister kept poking, needling, scratching, and scrapping me. And it just came out. One can go on smiling, ignoring, and remaining silent only so much in the face of taunting, humiliation, and micro-acts of physical aggression. And they think the violence will never come back and wet their feet, so when it does, they conveniently act surprised and defensive so they can put their manipulative mask on and spin it on you.
But lately, I have been thinking about it, how I am always so late, so tardy when it comes to reacting to violence. How much manipulation is required to suppress your natural, rightful, justified reaction to humiliation? I often think how all that repressed degradation gets lodged in the body like sediment in a river that once flowed freely but now chokes on its own stillness. It does not disappear. No, you think, if you laugh it off or ignore it, it disappears. No. It ferments while it waits so it can find strange, inconvenient exits through trembling hands, sudden bursts, and exhaustion that feels older than your years during the most important or the most embarrassing moments in life. And then, when it finally spills, everyone looks at you as if you are the rupture, not the pressure that built beneath. I keep circling back to this question: what would it mean to respond on time? Not too early, not too late... but exactly when the boundary is crossed. There is a kind of dignity in that immediacy, I think. A clean line. But I was not trained for clean lines, purposefully. I was trained for endurance, for silence stretched thin enough to look like grace. It is a part of the manipulation scheme. And so the body becomes the archive of every insult cataloged, every small violence indexed, and every swallowed word preserved like a fossil. No wonder it screams sometimes and it always wants out, so it itches you from beneath your skin. There is also this strange duality I cannot shake off... how I can spend hours thinking about policy, law, justice, and systems of power and yet feel utterly powerless within the four walls of my own home. Public is clarity, but private is chaos. To such a point that it almost feels fraudulent. Or maybe that’s the point? That the personal is not separate, that all these systems I analyze so neatly are rehearsed, miniaturized, and enacted daily in spaces that never make it to paper.
And still, amidst all this, there is this quiet, stubborn part of me that wants to write. Not to perform, not to impress, but simply to write it all here. To take all this formless heaviness and press it into language, even if the shape, grammar, and punctuation are imperfect; even if it leaks. Maybe that is the only way I know how to resist disappearance. Tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever I gather enough steadiness again, I will return to the questions I have taken up. It all feels connected somehow. The absence of data, the absence of acknowledgement, and the absence of timely response. They may exist on different scales, but they form the same pattern. For now, this is enough. I showed up to the page, even if late. Maybe that counts for something. Maybe that is where it begins again.
After the pop-off session, there was a long bawling session which happened after a long time. Then, I attended one seminar while I cleaned my bed and changed the sheets. The seminar was coming to an end, another meeting of a voluntary group came up. I remember how I had strategically avoided the last one because my inferiority complex had orchestrated and schemed it. But, the bawling session may have released something in me, so I just joined and caught up with the work and started the research. I ate my dinner although a toxic part of me was trying to seduce me into starvation. And after everyone went to sleep, I also nourished my body with some sweets and raw mango and then snacks.
My eyes still feel scratchy so I am pulled towards the bed. But, a couple days ago, I remembered that NaPoWriMo is arriving soon, so I had kept my eye to catch the early bird prompt and kickstart. But, now that I am almost done with the day and I still have work pending from my primary job, I am pushing myself to complete this entry, then complete the NaPoWriMo early bird prompt and then complete my leftover work and go to sleep. It is so calm and silent right now. Summer is slowly arriving. So the windy evenings and nights are back. The windows are slightly open, and the wind keeps slipping in like it knows this room better than I do. There is something about these nights (when the world outside quiets just enough) that makes everything inside louder, but also, strangely, more bearable...? The fan hums, the makeshift curtains breathe, and for once, nothing is demanding anything from me. There is no demand of performance, reaction, justification. Just this soft, in-between space where I can exist without being watched. It is almost ironic how the day was all rupture and noise, and the night has stretched itself into something so gentle. As if the world, after dragging me through its rough edges, is now offering a small apology in the form of wind. I keep thinking about the body again. How it cried today... fully, without negotiation. That does not happen often nowadays and I have also wondered about it that did I lose my ability to go off entirely as a part of "growth". Usually, now my grief is filtered, controlled, delayed. But today it just came, raw and unstructured, like before, like it refused to follow the same old rules. Maybe that is also a form of reclaiming time? Responding, even if late, but still responding. And maybe I have been unfair to myself when I call it “late.” Because what if it was never lateness, but survival? What if the body knew exactly when it was safe enough to let things surface? What if all these delayed reactions are not failures, but carefully timed releases? I don’t know. I am still suspicious of such kindness towards myself. It feels undeserved, almost like I am letting myself off the hook too easily. But then again, who put me on that hook in the first place?
Somewhere between the seminar, the meeting, the food, the crying, and now this quiet writing, I can sense a small shift... not dramatic or life-changing, but it is still a bit noticeable like a knot loosening just a little, little enough to breathe. The NaPoWriMo prompt is still waiting. My pending work is still waiting. Tomorrow will come with its own set of expectations, frictions, negotiations. But right now, in this pocket of time, I am not behind. I am not failing. I am simply here and I am writing, finishing something I started, not abandoning it midway like I often fear I will. That should count. It has to count. Because if I keep dismissing these small completions, these quiet acts of showing up, then I will always feel like I am living in fragments, never in anything whole. Maybe wholeness is not some grand, uninterrupted state. Maybe it is exactly this... broken hours stitched together by moments of honesty. And tonight, I was honest about the rage, shame, exhaustion, the strange, persistent will to keep going anyway. That has to mean something. Right? The wind is getting cooler now. The night is deepening. My eyes are heavy, but not in that suffocating way, more like a gentle pull, like sleep is inviting rather than dragging. I think I will let it, not as an escape, but as a pause. Tomorrow, I will return again to the writing, to the research, to the questions that refuse to stay quiet, to the accountability, to the gaps, to the attempt of making something visible where everything is designed to remain hidden. And maybe, slowly, I will also learn to return to myself on time.Or at least, closer to it. For now, this is complete. 31st March 2026 ends after the noise, with a window open, a body slightly lighter, and a page that did not remain empty. That feels enough.
~ Oizys.
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