Little Dead Thing: Poems and Commentary

by Paul Chuks

Paul Blenkhorn

Little Dead Thing

This is my first poem post-depression. My therapist is not sure I’m well because I tell her the world is still grey. Yesterday, I walked past a knife without the thought of blood. I saw the sky spread above my flailing window in its elegance and smiled at its darkness. I was curious to know what happens up there that makes it so dark — like my mother’s womb — like my brain. It surely doesn’t feel anxious that the rain would irrigate in the space of its leaving. It surely knows the sun will burn in its absence. Unlike me, a martyr of loss. A pupil of grief — the protagonist of a sad song whose silhouette lurks in every melody — enraging souls. Judge me this way; if I existed in this poem, I’d be a little god, ambling towards heaven. But I exist outside of it; I’m bright & dead simultaneously.

Q: What does poetry mean to you? Put another way, why write poetry at all?

A: Poetry because literature in general is my religion. Since i left religion, i sought something, anything that’d fill me the gaping hole in my spiritual life. I tried it with addiction. Didn’t work. Then i turned to literature, particularly poetry. Poetry is how i detox. When life has dealt me a blow, when it has taken down all rounds of Dante’s hell, when my country is falling apart & the headlines are as spooky as Netflix’s horror show, when i have a fight with my mom but still want to tell her i love her, when the world is bleak, i don’t pray. Instead, i turn to poetry. Poetry is how i detox. So, why not poetry?

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Self-Portrait in an Alternate Universe

Sciences say if truly the  alternate universe  exists, it’ll be polar opposite of what happens  here. Lord, the other day i  stood by the mirror, the scar  on my lips stretched into my  nose. In the alternate  universe this scar is a tulip  growing under a ripe god  who sprouts wine skin in  Springfield.

Had I written this poem from  there; god wouldn’t be unripe  & absurd. I mean he flooded  earth because men fucked men  then saved one man in an ark  whose generation continued to  fuck men.

Look at me — an accumulation of  what could go wrong in a man; my  eyes — an anthology of nightmares.

My mirror is the only artist  that gets me. How it slants  my nose & pinks my lips;  how it smiles back at me  when I smile at it. How my  hair-knots ball like fists  upon my head scaring stars  from dying above me. At  times I wonder what a  mirror looks like in the  alternate universe. Is it  insipid so that we are the color of  imperfection? Or just water  caught in a web so this  imperfection might drown  us? All I know is, I’m  shrinking — i’m shrinking

Q: As an artist (poet in this case) what makes a good self-portrait? Were you fair to yourself in this self-portrait? Why?

A: I think depiction. Poetry is a game of language. The poet and the artist, painter even, have the same duty of depiction. Whichever image, whatever idea comes to mind, the resemblance MUST be striking. In the case of poets, language is our ink, the page is our canvas and the reader’s imagination is the photographer. So while i think the meat of (self) portraits are the depictions, i also believe the reader has a duty of doing the colouring.

Was i fair to myself? Well, i would say i spun the block on a prayer i used to make back when i was religious. I would pray that God heals my cleft palate. Since he did not, I wrote this poem spinning the block on it and accepting myself. Although i have done some corrective surgery, the memory still lingers and the scar, evident. I think my answer is yes since i was self accepting.