NaPoWriMo Day 7: Two Selves Deconstructing I-Thou

Prompt: Write out a list of all of your different layers of identity. Now divide all of those things into lists of what makes you feel powerful and what makes you feel vulnerable. Now write a poem in which one of the identities from the first list contends or talks with an identity from the second list.

We were pre-warned that this might turn into a heavy exercise (it did, sort of). All these questions of identity made the lumber room that is my brain dig up Meredith Brook's classic anthem, 'Bitch' (I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother...etc.) It also dug up Martin Buber's 'I and Thou', and its philosophical discussion of two modes of existence...and then my brain went OK ENOUGH LET'S WITH THE WRITING ALREADY and the thing below took shape in a form that skree'd out of control into unknown and unexpected terrain.


TWO SELVES DECONSTRUCTING I-THOU
Costumer vs Rebel/Fighter

You’re a rage of hurricanes and the dam breaks, the tide comes in like a flood

Or you’re fire, burning hot as the blood in your fighter-bitch-swordswoman veins

Acting on Shakespeare’s all-too-real proverbial stage, channelling dreams and fury

Through the metal tines of pen nibs skittering over paper that’s a paler shade

Than your charred-stone psyche will ever be again, spatter-patterned by suicide attempts

Chronic pain, depression-dives into the blackest pit where they say Wonderwoman, Superwoman

Should rise, triumphant, from.

Triumphant? Perspective: mine, or yours. Or ours.

Costumer. Daughter. Researcher. Writer. Poet. Love. Friend: 

Compartments in my - our - brain

Labels stitched on tight with the black-and-white thread of expectations and non-expectations.

Every costume I sew is another identity, another shell, another made-self

In the great cosplay called Life, and every time fire scorches the blackened walls of your heart

When the hurricane tears down the last hasty-hammered fence built around the reserves

That bolster your bright (but secretly flagging) smile

I mend. I stitch. I construct. I rebuild what’s been consumed.

I preserve what can be preserved from the ashes of our rage and sorrow

From the battered safehouse where you, the real you – the real me – hides

Under lock and key.