5:30
AM, Tuesday: I wake up daily and continue my prayer: I want, I want, I
want.
I
want so much, have so little—time, endurance, day-lit hours when I have both
time to lay one thought upon another and the wakefulness to do so. Right now, I
want to unplaster my eye lids, wake up, and unfurl my body from the painful
pretzel it has become overnight, and get ahead before my daughter (who has
joined us in bed) wakes up.
I
try the old method: irradiating my brain with rage from Twitter to wake up
fully (also because I’m addicted). This morning’s fare: the now familiar
pandemic with unfamiliar twists—of the knife; the cruelty of empire; skirmishes
and insurrections; and tweets that give me the first of the day’s many stank
faces. I shouldn’t use adrenaline in this way, but it works: I’m awake, my
generator of rage seething in the background. That would do. Let’s do this.
5:55
AM:
I remember I slept early last night so that I could get some work done this
morning. I curse the neighbors beeping car alarm as I start to swing my feet
over the bed’s edge. I will be so mad if it wakes the kid. It
stops. I settle back, close my eyes, and grope for my thoughts. Feeling my way
for some calm, warding the grasping hands of the things I want to do, be, have
remembered, give to others, believe of myself. The sigils of my bondage are the
same as they ever were—pretzel, ouroboros, Sisyphus wheel.
The
first strains of the phrase “I wake up daily and continue my prayer: I want,
I want, I want” occur to me. Open eyes. Kid’s still asleep. Good. Go. Grab
pants, laptop, charger, phone. Leave room stealthily. The thought crystallizes
as I descend the stairs. I type it in my Notes app at the bottom of the stairs,
into a note where other fragments from these pandemic months wait.
6:10
AM: I
skim through tabs I’d opened last night: “6 Ways to Take Control of Your Career
Development If Your Company Doesn’t Care About It”; “Designing for the Quadruple Aim: How Can
the Built Environment Support Quadruple Aim Goals?”; “The 7 Things You Need for
an Ergonomic Workstation.”
6:20
AM:
I begin to type this note. I collect my thoughts from 5:30. I have finally
found, I think, a way into this article about my writing day that Rob
requested. It remains to be seen if this will indeed be a writing day.
7-8
AM:
Her Maj is awake. I hear what must be hunger tantrums, get to pacifying and
feeding, showering and getting her ready for school, posting on LinkedIn to
keep ye Olde professional persona alive.
8:25
AM:
At my bedroom desk to start the workday. More rage, this time from LinkedIn:
“Canadians who've transitioned to working from home permanently face another
change: a potential pay cut.” There is no depth, it seems, to which extractive
capitalism will not sink. I take the phrase I have been holding in my head, and
combine it with the other fragments that had been waiting:
I wake up
daily and continue my prayer: I want, I want, I want.
I use the
anaphoric I want to string the disparate nonsenses from the past three
months together:
I want poetry
again, poetry as patricide, poetry as effigy-burning;
I want the
pen, mighty against my thigh in swordless alleys;
I want to
perform heresy against the silence of my
culture;
I want to
medically-examine this question, leave it flayed,
filleted, laid open and bled out, dehusk the innuendo.
I want to see,
unlike others, the imp of the perverse playing us all like lithophones at the
edge of train platforms
9AM-6
PM: A
blur of project management spreadsheets, emails, Skype meetings, the spine of
my wooden chair chafing mine. 30-minute break for lunch downstairs, another 30
to pick the kid from school. I glance at the typed out note a couple of times,
add, move, remove.
6
PM-11:30 PM: One hour break to feed the kid. Handle the evening’s
meltdown. I don’t remember what it’s about. Caroline’s doing the bedtime
routine and putting her to bed tonight, so I can get some editing done for the
new journal gig I just got. I’m glad for this one, because I’d lost another to
COVID in March, but moonlighting is a laughable term that doesn’t begin to
describe the anguish of freelancing. For each batch of articles, I spend a
month or two doing work that will be paid for at least six weeks after I’m
done. I spend some time acquainting myself with the academic style guide. I
edit exactly one 12-page article. I work out how much I have earned in 5 hours
of work—$10/hour. Lol. More rage. Why do I do this? (I know the answer: more money, however
little, helps us tread water a bit longer). Perhaps I can go faster tomorrow
once I’m better acquainted with the style guide. There’s a mutiny in my
vertebral column, and in the lampshade crook of my bent neck. Let’s continue
this tomorrow.
I
don’t, I can’t look at the garbage I put down earlier today. It doesn’t have
that animating spirit to gather flesh around. All I know is I want: every
day is the same; I am encased in glass; I am confined to my wheel; my psychic
screams do not cut the dome. I’ll wait to see if a new direction will occur to
me.
But
I drag myself into bed, just, you know, for a change of posture. Caroline’s
asleep already. I hate sleep because it feels like dying before my work is
done. I get N.K. Jemisin’s “The City We Became” as an Overdrive Superloan. I’ve
heard good things about it and begin to explore the narrator’s paranormal New
York, the light text, running off the dark page, clawing my bleary eyes. I
don’t remember falling asleep.
P.S.
I
lost the developing poem two days after, before I could save it, but I am
thankful that the originating fragments were still in my Notes, and I was able
to feel my way around what the poem was, and how it wanted to grow into what it
became. I had panicked when I realized I had lost it, but that want helped
me feel my way through the rest of the poem. A fragment that helped me complete
it was my regret at missing the joint burial of my grandparents (who had died
within weeks of each other), and remaining unable to fully confront my grief.
This haunting thought returned just as a neighbor’s smoke alarm went off, and I
wondered what I would try to salvage if fire from one townhouse spread to ours.
Grief, frustration, and powerlessness often feel like sleepwalking through a
house on fire, when you know with certainty (although your body cannot move
fast enough) that you cannot save yourself yet—because there are other things
to take with you. But all that came two nights later, when I had some time to
search out the end of the poem. I am very grateful that it came back to me. To
give an idea of my speed in slow periods, this is my second poem in four
months. Here it is in its “final” form:
I wake up
daily and continue my prayer: I want, I want, I want.
I want the
poem again: poetry as patricide, poetry as effigy-burning;
the pen, warm
against my thigh in swordless alleys;
the
performance of heresy against our silences;
the
medically-examined question—the flayed drupe, the flesh disrobed,
the
extradited, planetary—stone in a chaos of sluice;
to ambulate
from the pupa of sleep, the bonds of no, the dome beyond,
for the
absolution of the dead that cannot forgive me
for deserting
their double grave, for the elegy withheld;
to be cleansed
by the finally-burning house
of memory, the
one I calmly pick curios within,
under a
galactic entreaty of alarms.
Tolu Oloruntoba is the author of the Anstruther Press chapbook Manubrium,
and The Junta of Happenstance, a full length collection of poems
forthcoming from Anstruther Books in 2021. He lived in Nigeria and the United
States, and practiced medicine before his current work managing IT projects
for BC health authorities. Tolu’s poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Columbia
Journal Online, Obsidian, This Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been
nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
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