September 19th, 2007 Comments Off
The 12th assignment from 30 poems in 30 days:
“Write a poem using syllabic verse. You can assign length ether by line or stanza. If you are stuck for a way to begin, start with this two-word ten-syllable line:
Incompatible Participation”
I wrote two, using set forms.
Summer Cinquain
Sunshine,
Lure me again
to Lych Gate; December
cherries; dense green shade; picnic lace
and words.
Winter Tanka
So long were the nights
of our grey stolen season.
Cold glitter of stars,
in the mist corporeal,
broken by morning’s bright frost.
It’s been interesting experimenting with formal structures as I have previously written most of my poetry without them, although I have used syllabics often in the past without realising that constituted an “official” technique. (Incidentally, I used them for the last three lines in each stanza of Barcelona.) I chose to use recognised forms here, without rhyme, as I did with Sapphics on the Deep in order to keep my focus on the specifics of the assignment.
But isn’t it odd what you pick up via osmosis. I remember in my first year of Professional Writing & Editing taking a long, complicated poem I wrote to my grammar teacher, the adored, illustrious Captain Slusher, and asking him to check it for me. He told me I could do it myself. I told him I hadn’t learned enough grammar yet and he said, Not consciously…
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September 10th, 2007 §
There is something I hinted in The fable my tattoo tells me… which I never intended to talk about in detail here. It isn’t what this blog is about. I’m thirty four and my history is history. I don’t know whether the subject will come up again but it has today so I’m writing it. I don’t know if you will want to read it.
But I’m writing it.
As a child I was sexually abused by my adoptive father. This information is for “back story” only. It is not something I feel the need to get off my chest. To be specific about the nature of that abuse; I was not raped. The majority of the abuse was what, as adults, we might call sexual harassment. Groping and sexual comments made to appear as jokes but with a real intention to intimidate and shame. My memories are sketchy but these are a few.
In Grade 3, I ask him if he would like a cup of coffee. He says, “No, but you can give me a head job.”
In Grade 5, being punished for something, I am made to take off all my clothes and stand against the wall. I stand there for an hour, waiting to be smacked. He just looks.
16 years old. My mother is away. He has been drinking and comes home. I have a male friend visiting. My friend leaves. I go to my bed. He comes into my room. For six hours he sits on my bed in the dark, talking about sex. The conversation begins as a warning against being seduced. It becomes a conversation about how wonderful it is to be seduced. He says, “I am sexually attracted to you.”
Not long after that, I leave home.
Perhaps this doesn’t seem particularly abusive to you in the scheme of things. There was no bruising. I have no scars. It is difficult to describe the pall over our house, the tension that arose in all of us when it was nearing the time he would be home.
Every day, he would play with himself on the couch while we watched TV. He would masturbate the dog.
He was an alcoholic; unpredicatable, irrational, aggressive and insecure and there were sexual overtones in everything he did. I lived in sexual fear throughout my childhood. That threat hung over me before I could even understand what it was.
The reason why I have written this is because a few days ago while looking for Australian blog carnivals as a way to promote my site, I came across a blog about child protection called Imaginif.
I didn’t want to read it.
I said earlier that my history is history but it never as simple as that. In my life I have spent a lot of time thinking about child sexual abuse, studying child sexual abuse, talking about child sexual abuse. I have spent a lot of time getting angry and getting better. I understood all that could be understood. I was done with it.
I don’t consider myself a survivor. That term reduces me to circumstance and traps me in the past. The events of your childhood, good or bad, provide the language through which you understand the world. They are like a desert wash, a dry stream bed, and when it rains, when life happens, the water naturally flows there and the channels deepen. If you listen to the currents, your childhood is the symbolic key to the map of your present self.
Tonight, I found out something about a young girl I know, which I cannot discuss here, and my stream bed flooded. I felt sick and voiceless and trapped and I was forced to travel through the physical memories of my past again. I recognised the echoes of my own pain and I reclaimed my anger.
I have spoken a lot here about not knowing who I am, about being nobody. There are many pressures in this world for us to reduce ourselves, to not feel too largely, to live passionlessly. To deny everything.
Not wanting to read that blog on a subject I was once passionate about, one that everyone would be passionate about if it wasn’t so unseemly, was just such a denial and I am voiceless because of it.
Tonight I remember the language of my childhood and I remember why I should never stop speaking.
Shrinking yourself to an inoffensive nothing is not just self-harm. If we do that, who will speak for those unable to? Who will cry for those who cannot? Who will guide those who are drowning in their childhood to safety?
__________________________________________
This post, Imagine if…, has received a Perfect Post Award. My humble gratitude to Musing Woman who nominated it. If you would like to read the other award winning posts for September ‘07, click here.
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September 7th, 2007 Comments Off
The first assignment from the 30 Poems in 30 Days project.
“Write a poem about your childhood. Explore an actual event that had some emotional significance to you. Avoid using any description of how you felt about the event then or how you feel about it now. Instead, try to make the emotion of the event come through in your descriptions of what happened.”
Drought
every day is summer
violent, unrelenting
barefoot and I am running
black tar, the road is melting
dry heat, the air is shaking
burnt skin and I am flying
down the road, the tar is sticking
every day is summer
passed the pubs, the men are drinking
passed the shops, shopkeepers idling
passed the town, the road is widening
through dry fields, tobacco dying
along dirt tracks, the dust is moting
then the shade, the trees are standing
by the river, water calling
water cool and dark and greening
every day is summer
I slide in and I am smiling
and the days are never ending
until the rain comes, then the flooding
every day is summer
I thought I’d keep my commentary until after the poem. I never read the introduction first. I like to make up my own mind.
All I have to say, really, is that I found this extraordinarily hard. My childhood memories are nebulous so trying to find a subject which I could limit to pure description was a challenge. It’s been a long time and I’m sure this won’t win any prizes but I don’t feel as though I have to apologise for it.
I like it. I like the rhythm and I like that, to me at least, it conveys something about growing up in Australia.
So, that’s one down. 29 to go.
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September 6th, 2007 Comments Off
I’m still struggling through packing up my house but after months of procrastination I’m finally on the move.
I’ve become ruthless. After laboriously sorting through every tiny item and trying to decide what to keep, what to recycle and what to toss, I’ve had enough. 12 industrial strength garbage bags of clothes for goodwill. That’s enough. I’m throwing it all out the window.
Literally.
There is a huge pile of garbage on my back patio just waiting to be bagged and binned. I may never quite be Zen, but how on earth – Why on earth? – did I amass all that stuff? No wonder I feel so weighed down by the whole process.
There is one small joy in stripping all that clutter away though. The memories. Those odd little scraps amidst all the debris that make you recall things you thought you had forgotten.
That film script I started but never finished, entitled Triptych: A Road Movie which is almost a cross between Female Perversions and The Wizard of Oz.
That poor, bedraggled porcelain doll I named Molly in primary school, which my Opa bought for me on his one and only visit to Australia, a country he swore he would never set foot in. But that’s another story. I had the most wonderful Opa.
The longneck beer coolers from the Grand Final Party at La La Land. I didn’t work that night, and I loathe football, but we hung out there all day, drinking and talking. A sunny afternoon in a dark bar, with musicians and cocktail waitresses, bartenders and actors, sprawled over the sofas and the floor, surrounded by red walls, passionate about everything.
A price list from Little Matchgirl Muffins, my tiny business selling baked goods to the cafe next to my office. Up at4am making chocolate éclairs and passionfruit tarts and caramel and almond fudge before settling in to do data entry for nine hours, my clothes smelling like cookies.
That fax with the phone number that just said, For things to do with Baileys after a car accident… And more recollections of life in bars after closing.
Those scribbled notes on the back of the Tranny Bingo list from my 30th birthday, especially the one that simply read, Happy Birthday Rayette…, a reference to Five Easy Pieces, one of my favourite movies, from one of my favourite boys who is now a man I respect so, so much.
And there is a box of love letters and trinkets still waiting to be explored. I haven’t opened it yet. There is only so much you can fit into a smile and mine will already last all day. It is slightly Mona Lisa but I can feel it.
In my eyes.
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August 28th, 2007 §
Motherbumper wanted to hear more stories about people’s body art. So this is mine.
Unlike Girl’s Gone Child, I do not “remember what I was wearing, feeling, and why I walked through the door,” but I do remember where I was in my life. These are the memories which return to me as I contemplate my tattoo:
I remember the beautiful arrogance of my youth, the arrogance of a girl who had left home at a time of her own choosing.
And I remember that boy, not yet a man, with the chocolate curls and the gloriously old fashioned name who often climbed in through my bedroom window to read Keats and listen to me speak although I would never let him touch me.
I remember throwing teacups and crying huddled in my closet.
I remember that party when the bed was moved into the back yard with the living room rug thrown over it, when the living room was cleared for dancing and we made a foam-room by lining the bathroom walls with black garbage bags and filling the tub up to the jets with litres of bubble bath.
I remember a girl named Lisa saying, “Thank-you,” after my friend and I had told the stories of our childhoods, the stories no child should ever have to tell.
I remember the first song lyrics I ever wrote.
when the shadow falls away i try to face all the pain
when the child comes out to play i try to turn her away
because the lover starts in again
i open my limbs to him
he opens the wound
insane
I remember reading everything I ever wrote to anyone who would listen.
I remember that power I had which I did not yet fully understand, which I used brutally against that boy with the chocolate curls after a night sitting on the floor in a corner of the uni bar talking to a girl who had far worse stories to tell than mine and a tattoo of the same comic book character. I remember pushing him hard up against a brick wall after we had left, crushing him with my body and kissing him deeply before turning and walking away.
Just because I could.
I remember my righteous anger.
I remember feeling fully justified and sure about everything I did.
I remember peeling back all my flesh, word by word, and exposing myself literally and figuratively to a world which could never contain me.
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