This week we wrote poems culminating in one of following lines:
“No one was supposed to get hurt.”
“And then he [or she/ I] went back to work as if nothing had happened.”
The first line is a household phrase from crime dramas; the second was taken from Franz Kafka as a familiar sentence “from any number of old stories—though it might not have appeared in any of them.”
Michael C. Rush chose the first of these to conclude his poem “In the Beginning”:
Everyone was supposed to die.
There was a plan.
Some people were going to propagate.
Some were intended to languish.
But there was deviation from the plan.
People stole focus from the gestalt.
Shouting “Look at me!”
they looked at themselves.
Screaming “Watch this!”
they did this and that.
The plan was abandoned.
The plan was rejected.
The gnostic became toxic.
People exceeded their purview.
People superseded their program.
Or believed they did.
Crying “We have usurped our destiny!”
they thought they had.
Postulating suffering as the coin
with which fate could be bought,
they spent themselves
to acquire a rougher path
to the eternal poverty.
O, unhappy knaves!
Everyone was meant to die.
No one was supposed to get hurt.
Not a bad way of twisting our expectations for a well-deserved "ohhh!" at the end.
In “You Just Went Back to Work,” Elizabeth Solsburg makes use of both lines in a narrative about a patient in a psych ward who had hoped for a spousal rescue, but... :
When they told you I had to stay
in the psych ward, I thought you’d rescue me,
and take me away somewhere safe;
I counted on you to stand up and say
I was not a danger to myself
or anyone—that this was just my way
of getting you to pay attention to me,
to shift your focus back to my life, away
from all the petty miscellany that eats your time,
that you shouldn’t be bothered with anyway.
You were supposed to tell them I’d go home with you,
that you would make sure I was OK,
you should have told them it was all a big mistake—
that no one was supposed to get hurt, especially me,
but instead you left me here and went away,
drove back to work like nothing had happened,
like it was any other day
Pamela Joyce S’s “The Cleaving” reflects the power of punctuation which can drastically alter the meaning of a sentence:
Given the years of feigned happiness
before deceit and calamity,
he asked, can there be equanimity—
a mutual parting of ways—
cerebral, free of regret and
fester? He turned the knife to test her
as she struggled for an answer.No. One was supposed to get hurt.
Angela Ball offers up a prose poem, “The Golden Age of Piracy”:
I hadn’t meant to deceive my colleagues, at least not at first, when I said I was spending the weekend with my friend, not adding that the friend was a fourteen-year-old Labrapointer.
When I left the house, Grace O’Malley climbed to the second floor to gaze down from her window seat, chin resting on the sill, gaze following my gray sedan as it pulled onto the street.
Entering the restroom at work, I heard a conversation between stalls. “Don’t mention it to ____. They might want to come along.” I turned and left. Probably they were going to a bar, the kind where people “hooked up,” a thing inciting terror, not interest. What did interest me was the secret of how people talked to each other, always knowing what to say. What did was pirates and their strict rules. Perhaps their lore held, like buried treasure, the secret of human behavior. I knew not to expect answers for why the grayness of Grace O’Malley’s muzzle was expanding, and the skin inside her lower lip, once black, had turned a jagged pink. The bathroom conversation went on. “Is she ‘on the spectrum’? —I don’t know, but that would explain a lot.” As Hugh Rawson says in his pirate’s dictionary,
1. The meanings of words change considerably, according to who says them, to whom, and in what circumstances.
2. The meanings of words change over time.
3. The way a word is spoken or said also is important in determining its meaning.
4. The power of a word as well as its meaning depends greatly on the setting in which it is used.
If I were on a “spectrum,” I would not be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet. I would be a Jolly Roger, saying My Prisoners Will Survive. I am an observer. This made me good at writing report after report defending our unit’s utility to the institution, good at studying pirates, and good at taking care of my dog.
One day when I had taken Grace O’Malley to the clinic, Brandy called with the dreadful report. “Come around five,” she said. “We’ll light a candle.” Blackbeard drank rum laced with gunpowder. Where to find some? I knew that my setting and circumstances were about to change.
I flung open my door, shouted into the hall, “After today I’m leaving. Let the pirates come and fire our cannon.”
Then I went back to work as though nothing had happened.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the entire post, and tune in next week for a new prompt!
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