OctPoWriMo Day 1. When the Lock Clicks // It All Starts With the Breath

OctPoWriMo Day 1. It All Starts With the Breath

Mary Oliver begins her book, Rules for the Dance(Aal), with breath. She says, “Metrical poetry is about: breath. Breath as an intake and a flow. . . . A cardinal attribute of breath (or breathing) is, of course, its repetition. The galloping footbeats of the heart, that spell fear. Or the slow and relaxed stretch of breath of the sleeping child. In either case, by their repetition, they make a pattern.”

Example Poem: The Visitor by Tess Taylor from Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman(Aal)

The Visitor

There’s something living underneath our floor.
We aren’t sure what it is, or if it wants
to scratch its way up to where we are.
We drown it out sometimes. Sometimes we can’t.
But nights, up from the floorboards, in the dark
it starts again, the rough, irregular
heave and rasp—the creature hard at work
in some crevice, god knows, of the old house.
In some dark place the mind is loath to venture,
it comes and goes without any permit.
And that this force cannot consider us,
is wholly ignorant of who we are,
seems monstrous in its total independence:
It is not trapped: It cannot be let out.

~ Tess Taylor

How does this poem breathe?

Prompt: Focus on your breath. Cover your ears and listen to your own breathing. Use punctuation, repetition, enjambment, and/or internal rhyme to create breath in your poem. Write about one of your deepest fears, expressing how your breathing changes when gripped by fear.

Possible Form: Breath poem – The breath poem is a condensed syllabic form created by Robert T. Randolph. It consists of a title and three lines with the syllable count 3-3-4. The aspect of the breath poem that I found particularly interesting is it is to be read aloud with a specific breathing pattern: After reading the title, read the first line while breathing in, the second line while breathing out, the first syllable of the third line while breathing in, and the last three syllables while breathing out, or inhale the first three syllables and exhale the fourth.

If you would like to share your poem, leave a link in the comments. Or, if you can’t link up, leave your poem in the comments and make sure to add your name.

~

Poem 1. When the Lock Clicks (3–3–4)

Hands freeze cold

the door breathes

not meant for me

Poem 2. It All Starts With the Breath (Free Verse)

Listen: shh—

the room goes to needle and thread; sound pulled tight.

Crowd noise, cut. Music, cut. What’s left is a metronome

inside the ribs: thump

(breathe)

thump.

I say, I’m fine,

and the sentence breaks on its first comma,

a small white flag of air.

Fear is a technician. It knows the switchboard,

which lights to kill, which sirens to test. It dims the room,

turns the hallway longer than it is,

and makes the lock consider other careers.

Breathe in: four counts, like hauling rope.

Hold: two (the floor learns a new language: creak; scrape).

Breathe out: six, because exhalation is a long exit,

a corridor you must walk without looking back.

Again. Again: (how prayer becomes repetition,

how repetition becomes rhythm,

how rhythm becomes proof you’re still here).

Comma, comma; semi-colon (linger), period. Stop.

Then start.

Because breath returns like a stray that knows your porch,

like a tide with nobody’s permission.

And when the doorknob doesn’t move; when it only seems to,

the heart keeps speaking its two-word speech: not yet,

not yet. And you, disciplined as a lighthouse,

answer on the beat: I’m here.

Afterbreath (companion lines)

In the hush, the ceiling fan ticks a quiet four,

a wristwatch you can hear with your skin. In the kitchen,

spice lifts when the jar opens... one small weather of home...

and the lungs loosen half a notch.

Out by the stop, buses arrive like thoughts you almost catch;

you count them the way you count calm: 1—2—

then hold—(the world pages past: faces, errands, light)

and let it go on six.

Tabs bloom at midnight, little windows of wanting,

until the room asks you back by name. Somewhere,

a cupboard door sighs shut; somewhere, a laugh in another room

measures the distance between fear and ordinary.

You practice the old choreography: kettle on, window cracked,

hands on the solid edge of the counter. Inhale (enough),

exhale (still here). The heart keeps time, and you answer:

not louder, just steadier, on the beat: I’m here.

Panic-echo (companion lines)

But then it quickens,

the walls lean closer, plaster breathing hot,

corners sharpening into teeth.

Every shadow bends in,

like the whole room has decided

you are the only secret worth swallowing.

Breath stumbles, breaks rhythm—

not four, not six—just jagged,

a staccato of gasps that refuse to line up.

The body insists on sprinting in place,

muscles braced as if the floor

might give way in the next half-second.

Urgency hums in the bones,

a siren no one else hears.

The ceiling drops an inch,

the window seals itself shut,

and you swear the air thins,

as if the world itself were running out of room.

You press your palms to the counter,

to the doorknob, to the frame of the bed,

as if touching what’s solid

could keep the whole spinning planet still.

And in that panicked narrowing,

the heart hammers its only message:

now. now. now.

And you: half-voice, half-whisper,

still disciplined as a lighthouse,

push back with one last, stubborn syllable:

here.

~ Oizys.

The [Perecian] prosaic life

The hum of the window while the wind cradles it. A half-wet towel abandoned on the chair. The way light bends off a cheap steel spoon. These are the things that never make it into anyone’s newsfeed, never headline the day, and yet they are the stubborn background against which everything else happens. Spectacular events like wars, crises, deaths, disasters get attention, applause, outrage. The big teeth of attention. But these crumbs are the texture of a life. The towel, the spoon, the drafty window. The undertow that moves the visible. Habit is a kind of anesthesia; it numbs you until you stop seeing. You stop seeing. You sleep with your eyes open. You stop knowing. You stop being seen. So I practice waking: counting the clicks of the fan, naming the shapes the light invents on the wall, listening for the seam in the room where wind gets in. Noticing the small is a way of waking up. There is a mother-tongue folk song from childhood I cannot remember fully, only the two lines I repeat with my mother and sister... the rhythm stays, the words have emigrated. My mother’s name carved in faint scratches on the underside of steel utensils. The rhythm of a ceiling fan thudding the same beat, night after night; its unambitious drumline keeping time with nothing. They are nothing, they are everything. The unnoticed holds the weight I didn’t know I’d stored there.

What if the real archive of a life is not in the milestones, but in its crumbs: the receipts that curl in the bottom of a drawer, the dust motes visible only in a certain slant of light, the way the fan clicks just before sleep? I write them down. Not because they’re important, but because they are.

Endnotes

1. “Habit as anesthesia” is a thought I keep meeting and arguing with. Georges Perec once asked, in an essay on the overlooked everyday: Where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space? I’m not answering him; I’m taking inventory. Perec’s inventory isn’t just sociological. It’s psychoanalytic in its hunger. It is about refusing the erasure of desire in routine. Freud would call it repetition compulsion on how the everyday dulls us, but also protects us from being overwhelmed. Klein might see in it the good/bad breast resurfacing in domestic scraps on how the ordinary object (like a towel, spoon) is a stand-in for the “object a” — banal, yet charged with unconscious memory. To name the towel is to name absence, loss, the mother’s body long gone. Habit anesthetizes but noticing breaks the narcotic, lets desire leak through.

2. This post is a page from the same notebook where I stockpile crumbs: bus numbers, spice labels, the names of colors the evening tries on. If it feels like a list, that’s on purpose. The list keeps me awake. So, writing inventories is a defense, a ritual, even a form of free association. Maybe my notebook [this weblog, this diary, this logbook, this corner of the internet] is what Winnicott would call a transitional object where I carry scraps so I don’t lose the self, I pour scraps into it so I don’t pour them out of myself. Which makes me think... Perec’s own obsessive lists were not just literary games but perhaps can be perceived as symptomatic, a way of keeping neurosis at bay: the anxious cataloguing of a man trying to domesticate absence, to turn the infraordinary into a shield.
3. I like to think Perec’s lists were never neutral. Born in 1936 to Polish-Jewish parents in Paris, his father killed in the war, his mother deported to Auschwitz and never returned, Perec grew up in foster care and silence. The infraordinary for him was not trivial but existential: cataloguing chairs, streets, tickets was a way of insisting on survival, of building an archive against erasure. His inventories read like a child’s desperate tally, a proof that the world was still there, and so was he.

4. The digital age complicates this. If Perec longed to preserve crumbs, today the internet floods us with them: breakfasts tweeted, coffees photographed, train delays live-blogged. But instead of waking us, the avalanche numbs us. A parody of Perec is a documentation that collapses into noise. Maybe that’s why the notebook still matters: paper slows the hand, turns noticing back into presence, rescues the crumb from the scroll.