IMPROMPTU #12 - Crushed bird skulls

Robert Fitterman asks us to collect people’s language of the body. I think immediately of pain.

I know you/have staggered wept spiraled through a long room/banging your head against it holding crushed/bird skulls in your hands your many hearts unstrung

--Kim Addonizio

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

This is when I feel the pleasure.

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –

It bubbles up from the bottom of my torso

The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’

and zips through my tense flesh

And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

a full-body buzz that thumps behind my burning skin.

The Feet, mechanical, go round –

My headache feels like two people

A Wooden way

are pressing really hard

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –

on two different cookie cutters,

Regardless grown,

fighting for the same piece of dough.

A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

The pain feels like burning, pins and needles,

This is the Hour of Lead –

and electric shock.

Remembered, if outlived,

Toilet head...my head feels

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –

like it is a toilet...filled with sewage.

My body, poisoned...sick and poisoned...chemically toxic.

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

SOURCES

Kim Addonizio, Here, Poem-a-day, April 11, 2016 in Poets.org; Emily Dickinson, After great pain, a formal feeling comes; Robbie Arnot, Blood in Leather, the Lifted Brow; Bald girl with headaches, the daily headache; 34-year-old male; T4; injured 5 years, Spinal Cord Injury Update, Spring 2009; Volume 18, Number 1 in University of Washington Rehabilitation Medicine, Northwest Regional Spinal Cord Injury System; Corinne, The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia Symptom Description Thread in Health Rising

NOTES

All text is from the sources without alteration. I feel for anyone who goes through pain, especially chronic pain. Collecting these feelings makes me feel guilty. I weaved Emily Dickinson’s great poem within and began the poem with Kim Addonizio’s words, also about great loss. Loss, whether through death or the abandonment of a lover, is painful in the body.

Thank you to Robert Fitterman for this prompt today.

Play along!

For those of you who are just joining us, The Found Poetry Review is celebrating National Poetry Month by offering daily experimental writing prompts from writers. I will be responding to them at poetic whim.