Amputation

[sevendeadlyfun]

It's different. This time,

I don't wait for the healing

to happen gradually, don't wait

for your things, the things

you left,

to find their places.

I sweep them away,

sweep you away

because it cannot be that you are here

and not-here. I already feel the dull heavy confusion,

the part of me that is you

amputated.

life after is awkward

limbs that lie

uncooperative in bed and the apartment

an alien landscape, feeling foreign

I don't speak the language

of loss.


While I am not cool enough to turn my fanfic hobby into something professional, I am a published poet. Yeah, it sounds just as cool when you say it to people in real life. They're all "Huh. Really?" because poetry is not something Americans, as a whole, are comfortable with. In fact, most Americans read all the poetry they will ever read during high school and manage to successfully avoid it thereon. So saying you're a poet, in an American context of high-powered jobs and high-rate mortgages, is akin to admitting you moonlight as a gloryhole attendant. People are confused that you'd admit something like that so openly, but no one wants to be unliberal or bigoted about your personal choices. If you want to be a broke loser, who are they to judge?

Actually...I'd make more in the gloryhole.

But, 48 hours into my husband's third deployment, I'm just trying to spring clean my head. And if anyone wants to con/crit (or better yet, write me some Spike/Xander gloryhole porn), I promise I won't lose my mind. I can separate the criticism of my words from the criticism of my feelings.

Comments

[anxiety-junkie.livejournal.com]

OMG, I would so write that, except I'm at work. I don't think my boss appreciates dirty!bad!wrong!Spander. *g*

[sevendeadlyfun.livejournal.com]

I can wait...:P Gloryhole Spander would definitely be worth waiting for!

[athenewolfe.livejournal.com]

hugs you tight - i like the poem!

[sevendeadlyfun.livejournal.com]

Thank you, sweetie. 15 months and counting!

[hello-spikey.livejournal.com]

mmm... gloryhole porn.

Okay, I fail at pornography - you said "gloryhole attendant" and I immediately thought glass blowing. *facepalm*

The poem is lovely - sparse. I like your line breaks - the part after 'amputation' is the strongest, which it should be, always best to end strong.

I'm a poet too. But I never tell people. It's like a dirty secret. Wanna know an even dirtier secret? Science fiction magazines print poetry and they pay better than more mainstream poetry markets. AND some of them accept electronic submission!

Hey, come on, people may not read poetry, seek it out - hell, one of my poetry buddies just got a book out and was harrassing me about doing a book, and I was like "Does anyone read poetry books other than aspiring poets who want to sell poetry books?" BUT anthologies and magazines will always need one-page filler, ma cher. (And failing all else, there will always be aspiring poets willing to buy your work so they can read it and understand how to be a better poet somehow.)

[sevendeadlyfun.livejournal.com]

Sci-Fi mags print poetry? Like Han Solo angst poetry or regular poetry? I'm not sure I can compose an ode to Stephen Hawking's Waveform Theory (or whatever because I fail miserably at real science). And for reals, poets deserve mad love and woe! we get it not. Unless of course you're trying to pick up slightly androgynous gender bending Marines...then? Poetry is the way to go. I wooed my hubby with erotic lesbian love poems...which actually fits because I'm convinced he's a secret lesbian.

*hugs*

We don't travel the same fics so I hardly ever see you but oh I do seriously groove on you!

[hello-spikey.livejournal.com]

Heh. Well, there is this assumption that poets are, like, deep and crap. Great way to impress. :)

Obviously, if you get some science or tech in the poem it helps - but not so much the "Han Solo Angst" because a) Derivitive and b) probably get a thousand submissions of that drek anyway.

I've sold poems about email, (well, actually about post-break-up emails with a metaphor of the spam filter choosing sides), about stars and planets (all Jupiter's moons are named for his failed love affiars.) Zombie esprit d'corps. Um...

Geoff's latest poem was an awesome sonnet on the Mars Rover. Which was a three-hanky piece, believe it or not.

Anyway, yeah, okay, the markets aren't useful if you can't have a vague reference to something science-y or science-fiction-y. The flight of a photon. Wondering if your cat is a space alien. Stuff like that.

[clawofcat.livejournal.com]

As I once said to only_passenger, who is an award winning spoken word poet herself, I don't know poetry very well. It was one of those genres , as you say, that got glossed over. A lot of it was too abstract for me to understand, or I didn't want to take the time to understand it, period, in school. Despite all that, I do know writing, and I thought that your poem was very heartfelt and spoke of a silent, cringe-worthy longing, the sort that eats away at you because there's nothing to do but wait. I can't offer much conc/crit by way of style or structure, but the sentiment of loss is strong and I think most of us can relate to that.

I guess journalism gets more props than poetry, culturally speaking, but no one in fandom asks "are you a published journalist?" either. Just are you a novelist, which I would never want to be and don't care about. But I am a published journalist (many times over) and even have a few awards to my name. So I raise my glass to you, we of the pubilshed but under appreciated writing genres. It's okay. We're in the subversive, cool club anyway.

Sorry to hear about hubby *hugs* And I would write you Spander, if I could. I just don't touch that pairing. Would you accept Spike with another male partner gloryholing it up, perhaps? Because that I probably could do.

[sevendeadlyfun.livejournal.com]

Journalism is, as the saying goes, srs bzness. As opposed to us slightly shady poets who are just all emo sex freaks. Or, you know, maybe I'm the only one who gets the emo sex freak attitude. Maybe I am an emo sex freak...huh. I may have found a whole new midlife crisis subject.

Yay for being subversive! Subversive always sounds like a dirty word to me, as if it were the formal name for some shameful sexual predilection. Like someone would say "Don't date John. He's really into that whole 'subversive' scene". Which, I suppose someone might say that but not mean kinky sex.

I NEED PORN! I have 15 months of celibacy staring me straight in the face. Porn is my new personal accessory of choice. And for the record? I will take Spike gloryhole porn wherever I can get it! In fact, Gloryholes will shortly be the 48-hour challenge.

So, to shock you down to your sexy little toeses, I am writing a Spuffy for the Random Masturbation Challenge. Just thought I throw that out there, by way of being random and shocking...

Thanks, sweetie. I'm always glad when you swing by! :)

[laazikaat.livejournal.com]

But that was beautiful. And powerful.

Poetry seems to be the new black.

I heard on the radio while driving to work last week about a US Soldier/Poet newly returned from the middle east war. His book of poems about the war is called (I think) Hello Bullet.

He writes in the same stark style.

I have a poetry section at Spander Files that wants this poem. Very much.

http://spanderfiles.net/arvs/sevendeadlyfun/amputation.html

I tried to keep your formatting exactly.

[angelswilliam.livejournal.com]

Your poem is a very hard-hitting extended metaphor. I don't quite understand the part "the apartment an alien landscape," but don't be discouraged by that, as my mind does not handle abstract ideas nearly as well as the average person. It actually has a specific disability with that area of processing.

As far as Americans and poetry....
I have a great passion for Robert Frost's work, who was an American poet, as it so happens. My favorite poem is "The Road Not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The last 3 lines are the ones I like to quote. Unfortunately for me, though, the pride I once took in taking the different path (being much less conservative and uptight than other Republicans and Christians and having my own very unique beliefs about the higher power system without allowing the Bible or the church's teachings to command my conclusions) has now been dampened by the fact that I can no longer be demonstrative about it while living with my parents in their oppressive and, at times, dangerously bigoted village.

[angelswilliam.livejournal.com]

By the way, and I'm very sorry I didn't say this first, your husband, you, and all of his and your family have my prayers and all my support, as well as my parents' and my cousin's family and my maternal grandmother. (No, I didn't tell all those people your situation. We are just all constantly praying for the troops and their loved ones for peace of mind, for strength, for safe keeping, for health and wellness, and for all the love and support they need. My cousin was deployed last March right in the middle of Baghdad. He is a naval computer expert. He came back in December. Even before that, though, we all have always supported the troops. I have, especially, because I have typed for a Naval Hospital and done some psychiatric reports, and I know some of what they face out there--from all the wars WWI - now. And I'm sure I haven't heard all of it.)

Crap, I hope I'm not making you feel worse. I just wanted you to know that you have my full support and that of many members of my family and extended family, as well as our sympathy and empathy. *sigh* I hope I didn't mess it up with too much exposition.