literature

A Return To Numbness

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xxDearOblivionxx's avatar
Published:
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Literature Text

The dead do not feel pain.
And we,
the anesthetized youth,
stand rotting in the shelter of the houses we were born into;
among the dismantled shingles of our parents' roofs;
in the garage with half a dozen keyed cars,
a hundred thousand paper bills soaked in tears and gasoline.

If I could want,
I'd light a match.
But the rhythm --
The incessant pounding of fists against brick,
the clang of chains and steel against metal bars --
keeps even the heat
from changing my mind.

They --
the dead --
do not choose the path their feet are set upon.
And I --
also dead? --
cannot be moved enough to tell them my alternate direction.
No -- cannot speak,
cannot even draw blood in the name of pain or fear,
or even
loneliness...

And there again,
the call of the cage.
The strain of chains,
the pervasive heat of that parasitic promise of rest
and a life that isn't mine:
perhaps
a life of white;
of endless, artless space.
Or black oblivion.
A silence
to end my silence.

I fill for a moment,
feeling the edges of a heat I fear more than dead nerve endings,
more than inaction, more
that an eternity in stasis:
that passion I can't control,
that temptress of unhindered rage that beats its wings
against my crumbling cork board.
Just a moment,
then the beast sleeps:
The rattling stops,
The rhthym fades,
and all inmates are silent.

bum
buda-bum.
bum
buda-bum.


The dead do not choose.
I did not choose.
And still,
my heart beats.
Empty is a terrible thing to be.

Comments and critiques much appreciated, especially concerning stanza division, line breaks, and punctuation -- it got a little weird.
© 2013 - 2024 xxDearOblivionxx
Comments9
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spartan-locke's avatar
:star::star::star-empty::star-empty: Overall
:star::star::star-half::star-empty::star-empty: Vision
:star::star::star-empty::star-empty::star-empty: Originality
:star::star::star::star-empty::star-empty: Technique
:star::star-half::star-empty::star-empty::star-empty: Impact

The character here comes out pretty clear in how her ponderances reflect herself, and by putting her on an existential precipice the story has a strong driving force. I think the heartbeat effect stanza is a tad redundant especially in the place of the more subtle last stanza which would seem to get the same point across if the heartbeat stanza was subtracted.

Ultimately it seems like the poem is exploring the idea of rebirth, and redefinition and whether its really possible to totally disassociate from one's past. The last three lines of the first stanza and the first two lines of the second seem to indicate that the narrator wants a clean break from who or what she was (and who she will be). She's bothered by the fact she didn't [essentially] choose her past and the results of its affects on her present and possible future, which is why she wants to be apart from her past, but now she's facing that whatever future is in front of her will undoubtedly be shaped by the past.

Most in some way reconcile their past with the new them, realizing that life often takes up the role of a tapestry, it you pull at one string you threaten to tear apart the whole thing. The narrator's struggle with that her life is impacted by choices that aren't hers are a reflection that she's concerned whatever destiny awaits her is out of her hands as well. It seems like she's taking that as a way of making herself insignificant, though the plodding forward of life may turn up future joy. Either way the poem seems to set up the idea that whether she falls into good times or not, because those results are not results of her choices they would be unsatisfying to her...

This has got some morbid introspection to it, its not really my cup of tea in narrative and I can't speak to the poetic structure punctuation use, but it seems like a decent work.