2 - Impure

NaPoWriMo Day 2, and I’m combining this one with my weekly forays into writing something for the Rattle Poets Respond challenge. Rattle have a very civilised (in my view) approach where poems submitted to them can be self-published online (blog, Patreon, social media, etc.), as long as they haven’t been curated elsewhere (defined as when someone else has picked them out and highlighted them for publication).

Reminder, however, that, if you’re a paying Patreon of mine, you’ll see all of my NaPo poems (and only Patrons – paying or free – get the recordings of me reading them). If not, you’ll only see the ones I have no intention of saving for third party publication (where they’re more strict in their definition of “previously published”).

This piece was inspired by this horrifying news story, so carries warnings for death, dereliction of duty, mourning, and a lot of grimness. It also talks reasonably openly about an aspect of the OCD I inherited from my mother – the so-called “Pure O” aspect of the condition that can be very troubling.

(Shout out to Lou Sutcliffe, whose extensive infodumping earlier this evening about Chilean geology and geography – which research rabbit hole they plunged into after listening to Tlacuache Theatre’s episode on the myth of El Caluche – informed the fifth stanza, which turned up when I was typing this up from handwritten notes.)

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Link to Patreon post with recording: https://www.patreon.com/posts/nightlights-154561064

It’s interesting how quickly I slip
into obscenities – not the obvious curses,
the worse words learned obverse to disaster,
casting this bark as tempestuous, cross,
oblivious to social constructs, mores
more important than scoring my rage…

No, I’m talking about the images that
glimmer on my inner eye,
wild flashes of nastiness, beset with
the grimness others have gifted
reality, humanity abandoned for
Mammon. That’s the real curse.

Verses buck under me, cleaving
these fleering demons fleeing
responsibilities to their victims,
living and dead. I cannot comprehend,
yet am doomed to see their sins
seared onto my occiput, rendered forever.

It’s not new to me – inheritance from
unoccupied pockets of ancestral
mentation, wretched wraiths etched into
inner vision, pricking with the gift of
what-if risk analysis, painfully vivid,
ultimately none of our business.

And yet. We are not islands, this
shit isn’t isolated; we are peninsular,
isthmuses, archipelagos of the
volcanic – product of pressures from
the obvious and not-so, above and
below, summoned from our molten core.

And still this vision lingers – the bodies
bodged, boxed wrongly, blocked
from the arms and hearts of those left
bereft, mendacities becoming more deft as
the dead stack, backlogged in
backrooms, abandoned on slabs.

My brain may visualise it effortlessly,
executive dysfunction can somewhat
sympathise, but my heart can’t
comprehend how they could end this way,
weighing dismay and coming up with
nothing – not even a stab at apology.

And so obscenity devolves to mystery,
glimpses of waste parading naked to my
inner eye, defilement surrendering
nothing but shame, and new
fuel for nightmares, wondering where
else bears this banal banishment of
basic decency that shan’t be laid to rest.

image of Paris catacombs courtesy of “Mustang Joe” on Flickr (found originally unattributed via picryl)