OctPoWriMo Day 15. The Mutating, Rondeau Cycle of Fear

OctPoWriMo Day 15. Stony Guardians

It’s easy to get used to looking at things in the same way. We spend our days sitting, standing, walking, then sitting again. It’s important to look at things from a new perspective. To lay on our backs and look up. To get up high and look down. Really look. What does the gargoyle see? What gives it the right to judge? Why does it attack?

Example Poem: “In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl” by Mary Oliver from American Primitive

In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl

Great bumble. Sleek
slicer. How the crows
dream of you, caught at last
in their black beaks. Dream of you
leaking your life away. Your wings
crumbling like old bark. Feathers
falling from your breast like leaves,
and your eyes two bolts
of lightning gone to sleep.
Eight of them
fly over the pinewoods looking down
into the branches. They know you are
there somewhere, fat and drowsy
from your night of rabbits and rats. One
this month you caught a crow. Scraps of him
flew far and wide, the news
rang all day through the woods. The cold
river of their hatred roils
day and night: you are their dream, their waking,
their quarry, their demon. You
are the pine god who never speaks but holds
the keys to everything while they fly
morning after morning against the shut doors. You
will have a slow life, and eat them, one by one.
They know it. They hate you. Still
when one of them spies you out, all stream
straight toward violence and confrontation.
As though it helped to see the living proof.
The bone-crushing prince of dark days, gloomy
at the interruption of his rest. Hissing
and snapping, grabbing about him, dreadful
as death’s drum; mournful unalterable fact.

~ Mary Oliver

Whose point of view is the poet exploring?

Prompt: Imagine two fears that hate each other. Take the point of view of one of them and explain why they hate the other. What will happen if these two fears meet?

Possible form: A Rondeau

~

PROLOGUE

I am the still one, embalmed in control.

You are the blur that stains the soul.

When we meet, there will be no whole.

Fear speaks five tongues, all of them mine.
Each eats the next like time devouring its own echo.

A. Fear of Silence vs Fear of Noise
Refrain: “The silence swells.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

Your clang devours my fragile spells—

I shudder when your chaos knells,

Yet hush consumes your endless role.

Our hearts exchange their toll for toll,

A ghostly duet, half and whole.

Your echo builds the walls of hell;

I speak, you roar, I break, you dwell;

The tinnitus repeats its toll.

The silence swells.

No prayer will tune this aching knoll,

No peace absolve what we extol.

Your noise rebirths the void I quell;

My quiet kills the sound’s cartel;

And thus we rot to fill the hole.

The silence swells.

(pause)

Noise dies, leaving thought in its wake

and thought, when cornered, begins to eat itself.

B. Fear of Knowing vs Fear of Not Knowing

Refrain: “The thought unspools.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

I crave the cut that makes mind cruel,

You hide beneath the bed of rule,

Refusing light’s dissecting toll.

You gag the truth, I probe the whole,

I map the dark, you guard the shoal.

You call my hunger epistemic fool,

I call your calm cognitive drool;

We tear each other to console.

The thought unspools.

The unknown lures, the known takes toll,

Each answer births a deeper hole.

We chase each why, yet play the ghoul;

I name, you flee; I burn, you cool;

And neither of us can stay whole.

The thought unspools.

(pause)

The mind cracks open, spilling infinity

and inside infinity, something begins to rot.

C. Fear of Death vs Fear of Living Forever

Refrain: “Eternity spoils.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

I crave an end, a dark parole;

You fear decay’s eventual toll,

While I despise your endless scroll.

Your days accrue like debts unrolled,

My nights are graves of growing mold.

You pray for breath; I beg the knoll;

Each time you wake, my silence stole,

A fragment from your mortal role.

Eternity spoils.

One fears the rot, one fears control,

Both gnaw the same immortal shoal.

I envy dust, you envy coal;

I fade to peace, you pay the toll—

Still neither wins the doomed patrol.

Eternity spoils.

(pause)

The corpse twitches; not from life, but from habit.

Change creeps in, uninvited, wearing Time’s old shoes.

D. Fear of Change vs Fear of Stagnation

Refrain: “The mirror cracks.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

You crave the storm that splits the knoll,

I guard the stone, the moss, the shoal;

You move, I anchor, both pay toll.

You shed your skin to claim the whole,

I clutch my past, a fossil scroll.

You laugh at walls, I curse the pole;

You bloom, I bind; you burn, I droll;

Each growth corrodes what made us whole.

The mirror cracks.

Time eats us both, a cruel patrol,

I stiffen roots, you lose control.

You chase tomorrow, I patrol

The grave of yesterday’s console—

And still the world forgets our role.

The mirror cracks.

(pause)

From the fracture leaks a strange light

and in that light, faces emerge, half-remembered, half-erased.

E. Fear of Exposure vs Fear of Disappearance

Refrain: “Name me and I fade.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

You crave the gaze, the spotlight’s role;

I live beneath the floorboard’s knoll;

We orbit shame as twin patrol.

You paint my shadow bright with coal,

I hide your outline, make it whole.

You beg for eyes; I seal the bowl;

You flare; I vanish, ghost in shoal;

Yet both of us are fear’s parole.

Name me and I fade.

One dreads the dark, one dreads the scroll,

Each fears the cost of being whole.

You flash, I hush, we trade the role;

You breathe, I hush; you gleam, I stole;

And in that glimpse, both lose control.

Name me and I fade.

EPILOGUE

I am the still one, embalmed in control.

You are the blur that stains the soul.

When we meet, there will be no whole.

Each fear devours the last,

and still the voice that names them remains:

steady, unmutated, human.

~ Oizys.

[Some After-poem Notes:

Today was a long day at work, home, everything blurring at the edges but when I finally sat down and read the prompt, something in me jolted awake. The idea of two fears that hate each other triggered a domino effect in my brain. Suddenly, it wasn’t just two; it was a house full of them, all hissing through the walls, each convinced it was the real one. I found myself at a crossroads of ideas, because honestly, I am a body-house of contradictory hates, each with its own animosity toward the other. The prompt felt irresistible. So instead of choosing one pairing, I let them all speak. Each Rondeau became a room, a voice, a mutation. 

As asked by the prompt, I have noticed that Oliver writes from the crows’ collective perspective, not from the owl’s. Like Oliver’s crows circling the owl, I wrote from inside the fears themselves; as the watchers, the haunted; rather than from the safe distance of the human observer.

I let the fears themselves narrate. The point of view, then, is Fear itself. It speaks through Fear’s shifting mouths. It speaks in all its masks, each stanza a different facet of the same trembling mind. Its each voice is a facet of the same consciousness, observing, accusing, and morphing in endless self-dialogue. Its each voice is speaking as both subject and predator, aware and terrified, embodying the watcher and the watched.

Silence and noise, knowledge and ignorance, death and forever, change and stillness, exposure and erasure: each fear devouring the next until nothing remained but the act of naming. Yesterday’s prompt about mutation clearly left its remnants behind for today, shaping how these fears transformed and folded into each other. That’s why this piece became cyclical. Fear doesn’t end; it only molts. And in that mutation, maybe it becomes poetry.]

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.)