OctPoWriMo Day 7. “spine & ribs” // “BACKBONE”

OctPoWriMo Day 7. The Core of Our Beings

In poetry, the skeleton of your poem can be its poetic form or shape on the page. It can be the through line of the poem: a mood, a color, a theme, or extended metaphor. It can also be an emotional arc and/or a narrative structure.

Example Poem: “Sleeping with One Eye Open” by Mark Strand from Voetica.

Sleeping With One Eye Open

Unmoved by what the wind does,
The windows
Are not rattled, nor do the various
Areas
Of the house make their usual racket–
Creak at
The joints, trusses, and studs.
Instead,
They are still.
And the maples,
Able
At times to raise havoc,
Evoke
Not a sound from their branches
Clutches.
It’s my night to be rattled,
Saddled
With spooks. Even the half-moon
(Half-man,
Half dark), on the horizon,
Lies on
Its side casting a fishy light
Which alights
On my Floor, lavishly lording
Its morbid
Look over me. Oh I feel dead,
Folded
Away in my blankets for good, and
Forgotten.
My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled
And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my loose ends
Loosen,
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.
~Mark Strand

How does the structure of this poem help to convey the meaning?

Prompt: Write a poem about a skeleton of any kind. Use sensory details from at least three senses, and a personal experience of one of the fears from your list. Use your line breaks to give your poem an interesting skeleton.

Possible form: Mesostic. The Mesostic was created by John Cage. You may choose to use the Mesostic Poem Generator to generate many different Mesostics until you find your favorite.

~

A note before you read: I tried understanding Strand's poem as I found it super interesting. Strand’s poem builds a rattled music out of short stepped lines and internal rhyme (“maples / able,” “rattled / saddled / handled”), making a house that should creak stay eerily still while the speaker absorbs the disturbance and form enacts anxiety. The abrupt line breaks (often on prepositions/articles) create micro-stutters; the repeated two-beat tail-rhyme mimics the half-moon’s off-kilter light; and the final couplet’s neat closure (“open / hoping”) ironically seals the dread. So, net: structure = symptom. The OctPoWriMo Day 7 prompt asked for a poem about a skeleton, with at least three senses, a personal fear, and line breaks that are a skeleton. Here are two versions: a free-verse “spine & ribs” layout, and a mesostic (John Cage's "What you say. . ."–style) whose vertical word is BACKBONE (I mark the vertical letters in Caps inside the lines). (For mesostic background: vertical phrase intersecting mid-line, unlike acrostics.)

Poem 1. “spine & ribs”
(Free-verse;
Fear: the latch that won’t open; 

Senses: sound, touch, smell, taste, sight)

the night is
a thin spine
    of doors

I put my ear to the vertebrae—
  k—k—click (no give)
the metal’s breath tastes
  like a coin held too long—
copper on the tongue,
    palms damp as peeled fruit.

under paint:
  the musk of old wood, rain-leaked,
a faint mold note rising—my mother once said
    the house keeps receipts.

I count each rib of the corridor—
  frame, jamb, latch, bolt—
as if touching the names could hold the world still.

behind me, the air’s cool hand
  slides my hair aside;
in front, the keyhole is a pin-eye sun,
  sting bright, useless.

“open,” I say, softly, to the bones of the door.
the hinges remember their rust and answer
  with a powder-dry sigh.
I press the whole map of my body to wood—
  grain against skin,
    fear against frame—
until the house and I share one cautious heartbeat.

somewhere a kettle begins to think;
somewhere a street dog shakes rain from its coat;
and something inside me—
    the small animal that hates to be seen—
climbs back into its cage of ribs,
  lays down,
    and listens to my breath
find its old, honest measure.

Poem 2. “BACKBONE”
(Vertical letters down the center spell BACKBONE;
Senses used: taste/metal, touch/sweat-grain-heat, smell/varnish-rain-gas, sound/kettle-brake-tags, sight/moonlight.)

Brittle moonlight sips the keyhole; I taste metal on my tongue, a
hAnd on the knob, slick with a kitchen-salt sweat—
the Corridor holds itsself together by smell: old varnish, rain, a thread of gas—
the locK thinks about other careers again.
Beneath my palm the door’s grain BuRns a faint path—
mOrse from another room: kettle / bus-brake / a dog’s tags—
the Night leans its ribs against mine;
and i End the count at one word that fits in any latch: here.

~ Oizys.

October 7. 1 AM.

It’s too late to be awake, too early to be anything else. The building hums with the quiet of everyone else’s decisions... sleep, surrender, silence. My laptop screen is the only thing still breathing in this room. I keep telling myself I’ll go to bed after I finish this sentence, and then I keep finishing new ones. It feels like cheating the clock: small thefts of consciousness from a day that never quite belonged to me.

I woke up to a meagre hike that left a taste in my mouth of a bleak future. The day continued to sour as the crusty scalp became crustier, deepening the headache that came from too many skipped washes. The hours unfolded like a badly folded letter with corners not quite meeting, edges smudged with anxiety. The bank issue resurfaced unresolved, and amid too much work, I couldn’t even gather the courage to pick up their call. I’ve been waiting over a month for that interview that got rescheduled without a date, and after the hike, I mustered up enough courage to type a follow-up email... only to save it in drafts. I dragged myself through the checklist, even doing some extra for tomorrow in case I wake up empty. Later, guilt pushed me to respond to the bank with a typed apology to replace my silence. Anxiety hummed its usual static on the jitteriness meter; I kept imagining what new bureaucratic horror they’ll unfold tomorrow. My only prayer: that I never have to visit the bank physically.

And through all of it, I could feel the paracosm slipping more and more... those little fractures between thought and speech widening until even my own words felt misaligned. It’s annoying as hell, honestly, like my head keeps buffering mid-sentence while the world expects fluent performance.

Breakfast and lunch didn’t happen, so just a bag of salted chips and papaya dusted with more salt was the first meal of the day after I was done with the above by evening. Eventually, I showered and covered myself in lotion, hoping routine might coax the mood into motion... but it didn’t. The skin feels wrong tonight, prickled by the pants meant to comfort. The hike doesn’t feel like growth at all; it feels like pity dressed as progress. I almost thought, why did they even bother?

Today was heavy in the strange way light can be: when it floods too bright, too fast, and leaves you blinking. I tried to keep pace; emails, deadlines, the performative choreography of being fine; but underneath it, there’s this faint static, like something unsaid knocking from the walls of my head. I don’t know if it’s exhaustion or awareness, but lately I feel like a copy of myself running a few seconds behind the real version. Maybe this is what happens when life runs on delay, you end up chasing your own echo. There’s no conclusion tonight, no moral or metaphor waiting to be written. Just the quiet hum of machinery, the ticking cursor, and the taste of old tea that somehow made it through the day. Maybe tomorrow will have softer edges. Maybe not. For now, I’ll let the sentence end before the night does.

(cursor blinks once, patient as ever)

~ Oizys.