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.