Here
here
by jami montano
It’s to remember and to feel, to hurt more than ever intended upon ourselves.
So when we forget, we pull them out of dusty chests in our attics.
To cry, to feel, to not forget.
To feel immature and stupid about allowing our former underdeveloped minds be the ones to raise us.
We meditate over busted sunflowers.
We meditate in forced isolation.
We redrink our booze
rethink our position per day
and cry.
Digging through dimensions, finding every bit of ourselves materialized and tangible.
Finding ourselves sadists.
Voila! Hurt yourself to prove you still feel…not quite, but i get the picture and it’s the kind where you walk into a modern art museum trying to get to the main attraction so you follow the arrows and jump onto this enormous hamster wheel made for humans in some reversal of roles irony and you’re just running your ass off sweating 9mm bullets and you look over and see a whole sleu of Asian tourists (cause they’re really the ones who enjoy modern art) and that’s when you figure out that you are the main attraction.
Anyway, yeah, the pain of growth is shoved under the rug and sometimes we just want to ignore the true nature of life, perhaps, and just get on with having some fun and forgetting all the anxiety, depression, remorse cause that just makes you more in need of a prozac and a rum-n-coke…but we shoot ourselves in the foot when we ‘forget’ or don’t pay the piper so we keep on learning lessons the hard way until it’s drilled into our head with a black and decker diamond bit. We hate the pain so much that we run from it instead of dealing with it and deep down we know it will rebound…so it’s almost like we enjoy pain–hence the sadist. That’s my impression…right or wrong, it’s what i get waking up reading this piece in my glow-in-the-dark thong. Life’s a bitch sometimes.
Excuse me; YOUR glow-in-the-dark thong? As I recall, I said “borrow” not ‘have’.
To me, this work say that life is suffering and if I accept that and still enjoy living is to be a confirmed sadist. A forrest of trees falling on deaf ears alone in the woods among wooden expressions and lonely clapping hands and all that aside, this has some good lines to it.
The opener reminds me of attachment to sentimental things, to find meaning, noticing that some experience cause an emotive response and if not feeling what else is it? Feeling being the measure of validity here, I got lost on “redrink our booze”…unless that refers to going to the store to buy another bottle of the hair of the dog to summon up memories otherwise too dormant to detect (in which case, it is not the specific object that harmonizes into emotional achievement but rather some somatic gesture that helps.) If it is, may I offer the line “revisit our drink” as a rewording.
Time alone to sort through these things seems essential. The shift to time alone together with reference to “We” and “our” makes this either a communal thing or a fractured personality thing. Interesting bit there.
It ends with the thought that digging through this painful cut with sanitizing iodine somehow signifies we enjoy the suffering. The work feints toward melancholy as the default state of mind for either the audience or the poet. I don’t believe it is, so most likely it means the poet. Associating the experience of awkward adolescence to the process of an unflinching personal inventory also seems like a stretch.
I do applaud the idea of using early childhood impressions and long-term inner dialogue to connect the dots. I’m just not so convinced its best done in a dusty attic sunbeam all alone. Pull out a photo album and dredge up not just the names but how these people informed your life. That I can get behind.
The poem paints a mood I can relate to. I felt the heavy dry air of the crawl space in my lungs and it burned my eyes a bit. Good work.
Very professional critique, Halifax! Respectful and constructive!
This poem didn’t do it for me. It points out the burdens of being conscious beings which are valid enough, but the language of this poem doesn’t move me. I’m not sure that there’s a voice here, but if there is: it’s whispering. Or maybe it’s crying. I don’t know… Anyhow, I just want to say that for a strong discourse of consciousness you should check out Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.” There’s a definite voice there. If you haven’t read any of his stuff, he might interest you.
PS: It’s probably because of the time I put in working at hardware stores, but I liked Quasimofo’s learning lessons/drill bit simile in his review. Very nice.