OctPoWriMo Day 3. When Fear Gets On Your Hands

OctPoWriMo Day 3. Scares Can Get Sticky

Think of all the different textures around you. How many different textures are you touching right now? How do these textures affect your mood, your physical well-being, your thoughts? Did you choose these textures yourself?

What textures do you avoid? What textures scare you? What makes them frightening?

Example Poem: “Web” by Mary Oliver from American Primitive(Aal)

Web

So this is fear.
The dark spider scuttles away
over the underboards.
I watch the blood bead on my skin
and think rapidly:
the last dollar,
the last piece of bread,
lightning sizzling under the door.
Whether it hurts or not
I imagine it does.
I remember a bat caught years ago
in the attic, how he tired
among the swung brooms,
not knowing we would let him go.
I get up to walk, to see if I can.
So this is fear.
The trapdoor
unnails itself; in the dusk
the curtains move
as though the wind had bones.

~Mary Oliver

How does this poem bring textures to mind?

Prompt: What textures frighten you? Choose one or more that brings a clear memory to mind. What rapid thoughts rush in while you’re exploring this tactile memory? Include the textures, rapid thoughts, physical sensations, and the memory in your poem.

[Image taken from Experience Writing blog]

Possible form: A Calligram – The calligram is a form of concrete poetry published by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918. The calligram creates shapes with words. The shapes are as important to the poem as the words. Unlike typed concrete poetry, the calligram uses changes in size and shape of the lettering, and leaves white space in the image.

~ 

A texture wordbank I made before I started writing the following poem, I did not use all of them, though: ooze, clag, tack, grit, burr, rasp, welt, prickle, thrum, sear, rime, slick, clot, pulp, fleece, chafe, scald, bristle, pucker, drag, smear, crust.

~

                When Fear Gets On Your Hands

                   Glue sheen on the jar rim,

               a sugar tack that won't let go.

                My thumb strings web to lid, 

                       strand, strand

            and the counter keeps a fingerprint of shine.

            Under it, the wood has a grain that runs the wrong way,

          lifting splinters like small, sharp questions.

             Kettle hisses; steam salts the air;

           it kisses; then stings the knuckles; so I flinch late,

        somewhere the fridge coughs and swallows it back.

                  Skin answers first:

             prickle along the forearms,

         sweat beading into beads into a slide,

                   a salt rime at the lip,

              salt tracks I didn’t vote for.

    Brain files a memo marked ORDINARY:

        breakfast, weekday, sunlight behaving itself.

    Body returns it unread, stamps URGENT in red,

          sticks the paper to my wrist,

     and I still think: this is home, surely this.

                  Every texture gangs up,

               grit in the tea tin hinge,

            a hinge-rasp that files the air,

          denim rasp at the crook of the knee,

      the elastic’s bite mapping a border I didn’t draw.

           Bus-days return: strap-tack stamped in my palm,

             denim rasping the knee, AC breathing cold.

                Body says go; brain says: it’s only four stops.

           I steady the jar, twist past the sugar seam.

                Threads snap. The lid burps loose.

                A sugar smear rings the mouth.

             For one soft second, nothing clings to me,

          then breath catches on a burr of air,

   paint blisters at the jamb; a splinter scouts my thumb; my palm slicks,

             and I remember the door that didn’t open,

               the paint that blistered like a warning,

            the way a lock can learn to think about other things,

                 a knob that only seems to move,

         and still, I say it out loud, to set the skin at ease:

                        I’m here. Not safe, maybe—

                                   just here.

                        The hand unsticks. The day goes on.

                                   ~ Oizys.

October 2. Life update: the trip I never took while I was on rumination mode with the bezoar inside me.

I went on a trip. Okay, it was not a trip. It was a conference. So, I went to live in that in my own city. Towards the end of September, right before my contract ends. Break from my home, my cot, my family, my usual spot, my stagnant pond. Strange how you can feel far away without moving very far at all, as if distance isn’t in miles but in breaths. Before going, I kept on thinking about the rumination. A metaphor for my habit of rumination. What could it be? And, it can also capture the animal gnawing inside me. I did find some snippets on Pinterest that were close enough for my animal which I kept with me for inspiration.

Inside me, something seethes. Inside me, some feral animal claws at my rib cage, trapped.

—By Molly McCully Brown. [Read the rest here.]

If people were too mean to you when you were growing up, a newborn animal will materialize inside your brain and it’s so so scared and shivering and it will stay there for years. Decades, even. And whenever you say something kind of weird but true to your heart the animal will tell you “Noo! You can’t say that! If you say that, everyone will hate you!”. The animal means well. It’s so so small and everything is so scary for them and it’s just trying to protect you. But listen to me. Listen to me. Whenever this happens, you can’t do what the animal says. You can’t. If you do, you’ll become as scared as the animal. You have to keep saying weird shit. You have to keep doing things the animal wouldn’t approve of. If you do enough things that scare the animal, maybe one day it’ll go to sleep.

—By crtter, a tumblr user.

Then, I came across the word bezoar. It's perfect for the metaphor. A ruminating, animalistic bezoar within me.  The trip was a break from my reality of "sempiternal-daydreaming-mode" while living life. The two days shook the bezoar loose. Almost as if, the animal inside me stopped gnawing long enough to look around. I met my manager and another co-worker who, so it seems, lives in the same city as me. I knew that piece of information. It was there, somewhere in the back of my mind. But, I never registered it enough to "very-obviously" predict he might be there as well. So many things happened. I am starting to forget, blurrily. Starting to forget that even for two nights and two days I went away. Starting to forget that even in the same city, I went away. The conference started with a huge FOMO, I kept thinking of speaking up, rather than speaking. But, some moments rolled me in them and I spoke here and there. The animal hated it, of course, but, for a moment, it learned I could speak anyway. I had gotten my period before I left so the days leading up to my period were horrible, of course. Like every other month. Earlier I would wonder why I have a monthly episode. Now, I know it happens. And, I let it happen and surprise me. After it is over, I retrospectively affirm myself, it was my period, after all. So, after I left and reached the hotel and I was alone for a bit, my mother called me. She was sick. I have been back now and she is still sick.

Since the start of this role, I kept a bright, private hope. I built myself a promise: by September’s end I’d land elsewhere, go away, reset. I’d have another position, I’d be gone, I’d be new. I had already fantasized about my solo road trip for my birthday this year. Haha. Cruel fantasy. When that didn’t materialize, my imagined safety net was simple: either continue here, or keep hunting from this same room while I stayed put, listening to the family’s clutter-clatter soundtrack of this house, the house’s endless tin percussion, drilling holes into my focus and soul, every noise another chew of the bezoar. That’s the safety net: not safety, just staying. The bezoar loved this plan: no movement, only rumination dressed up as prudence.

There is a recurring contemplation in mind. I am struggling with it and to top it off, the bezoar enjoys feeding off on it: What if (and when) I leave this house. Then what? My role. My significance. My insignificance. My worth. My measure. After I came back, my mother's health worsened. She had some kind of allergy. And, she had cold. We still don't know if they're related or unrelated to each other. But, they are surely aggravating each other. I often fantasize about leaving and never coming back. The "never coming back" is often a scenario where I have nothing to come back to. No family, no house, no relative, no friend. A disconnected leaving with the discretion where I opt for not coming back. I have been craving this more and more.

And then the month ended anyway. The end of September was the end of my employment contract. Hope kept its calendar. Reality didn't. I had not received a single word of renewal, closure, extension or whatever. And the bezoar had grilled, ravaged, and pillaged me with about it. Although, towards the end, I felt like they would let me continue here. But the complete lack of communication was so delicious to my anxiety. And, cherry on top? The psychoanalysis of every bit of action during the conference with my manager. On the first day of October, my co-worker asked me for some support on a project. So, I put aside the fear and emailed the HR about it. I also included if it indeed has ended, then when will I get my dues back. And, she responds to me with the answer that was completely apt for calming all my hive-like anxiety. But, she accompanied the answer with an undertone that I committed a huge mistake by asking this. Like it was equal to stuffing a dagger into her back. The bezoar glowed with a powerful, chaotic energy, like a magical mutant triggered by the combination of a mandrake's lethal scream and the mystical power of a blood-moon. Which is how the contract bled into October with silence doing most of the talking.

I sometimes think if I had a safety net, something to fall back on, or the confidence in me that I can find something else, then I would have left immediately. This organization and my previous company. I think the same in terms of my family. I packed a bag for two nights and two days because I got this one opportunity to go mere miles away for mere seconds. The chains of needs shackle me to people who disrespect me. If we look at it on a macro level, how often these needs and shackles are intrinsically manufactured to keep us as-is. If my mother could have left, she would have left a long time ago. If I could have gotten up and left that dark room at night while that hand grazed, I would have left a long time ago. If my sister who earns so much money could have left, she would have left a long time ago, traveling around the world.

And so I stayed. With “the trip I never took, the leaving I keep gnawing on.” The bezoar sits where it always sits: heavy, patient, chewing the hours. October began and I started OctPoWriMo anyway. If I can’t leave, I can at least listen. If I can’t move far, I can move a sound across a page. Click, drip, hiss: small work, but mine. Each day I try to give the animal a new shape: a line break, a hinge-creak, a breath counted out loud. Some days the bezoar softens, almost rolls. Some days it doesn’t. I write anyway. Maybe this is the safety net I can afford: twelve syllables of steadiness, a stanza that doesn’t run, a voice that speaks even when speaking-up feels like treason. For now, I’m here, in this city I left without leaving, teaching the dark I carry to hum softer, teaching my mouth to open and not apologize. Tomorrow, another poem. Another inch. Another breath. I have been applying extensively to places far, to places near from this same room, this same cot, this same stagnant spot. The applications scatter outward, but the clutter-clatter comes back in. I am still anxious. I don’t know if anything has changed, or if the bezoar only grows cleverer at disguising itself as hope. Maybe that’s what OctPoWriMo is for? I hope so... to remind me that sound is still movement, that even if the body stays here, the words travel, the breath escapes, the latch opens. For now, I keep writing, keep gnawing, keep breathing, until something breaks free: be it me, or the animal inside me.

~ Oizys. 

P.S. — Still waiting on the new contract. It hasn’t shown up yet. Maybe it’s lost in the same room I never left. Fingers crossed for a salary hike, lol. Maybe there will be a hike, maybe not. The bezoar would at least enjoy chewing on that surprise.