Week 3 - EXPOSE YOURSELF

The first two weeks got an interesting crop of responses - but there are still a lot of people sitting on the edge of the creative pool and not diving in. This week's prompt might encourage more people to join in - or run away! It's challenging.

For week three Jo Bell, in her book 52, encourages us to expose ourselves. Please respond withing the boundaries of the law :-)

The subject this week is your own body. Jo Bell predicts that we will instinctively respond by writing something self-deprecating, and that's okay, but she urges us to go deeper. She ends by saying "it might not be comfortable, but you're not here to be comfortable. You're here to write!

Large Intestine

by Anna Swir

Look in the mirror. Let us both look.

Here is my naked body.

Apparently you like it,

I have no reason to.

Who bound us, me and my body?

Why must I die

together with it?

I have the right to know where the borderline

between us is drawn.

Where am I, I, I myself.

Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?

In the hollow of the sex? In a toe?

Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.

Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right

to see myself. Don’t laugh.

That’s macabre, you say.

It’s not me who made

my body.

I wear the used rags of my family,

an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair

after my grandmother, the nose

glued together from a few dead noses.

What do I have in common with all that?

What do I have in common with you, who like

my knee, what is my knee to me?

Surely

I would have chosen a different model.

I will leave both of you here,

my knee and you.

Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body

to play with.

And I will go.

There is no place for me here,

in this blind darkness waiting for

corruption.

I will run out, I will race

away from myself.

I will look for myself

running

like crazy

till my last breath.

One must hurry

before death comes. For by then

like a dog jerked by its chain

I will have to return

into this stridently suffering body.

To go through the last

most strident ceremony of the body.

Defeated by the body,

slowly annihilated because of the body

I will become kidney failure

or the gangrene of the large intestine.

And I will expire in shame.

And the universe will expire with me,

reduced as it is

to a kidney failure

and the gangrene of the large intestine.

Anna Swir, “Large Intestine” from Talking to My Body, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan.

A NEW YEARS GREETING by W H Auden

    On this day tradition allots

        to taking stock of our lives,

    my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,

        Bacteria, Viruses,

    Aerobics and Anaerobics:

        A Very Happy New Year

    to all for whom my ectoderm

        is as Middle-Earth to me.

    For creatures your size I offer

        a free choice of habitat,

    so settle yourselves in the zone

        that suits you best, in the pools

    of my pores or the tropical

        forests of arm-pit and crotch,

    in the deserts of my fore-arms,

        or the cool woods of my scalp.

    Build colonies: I will supply

        adequate warmth and moisture,

    the sebum and lipids you need,

        on condition you never

    do me annoy with your presence,

        but behave as good guests should,

    not rioting into acne

        or athlete's-foot or a boil.

    Does my inner weather affect

        the surfaces where you live?

    Do unpredictable changes

        record my rocketing plunge

    from fairs when the mind is in tift

        and relevant thoughts occur

    to fouls when nothing will happen

        and no one calls and it rains.

    I should like to think that I make

        a not impossible world,

    but an Eden it cannot be:

        my games, my purposive acts,

    may turn to catastrophes there.

        If you were religious folk,

    how would your dramas justify

        unmerited suffering?

    By what myths would your priests account

        for the hurricanes that come

    twice every twenty-four hours,

        each time I dress or undress,

    when, clinging to keratin rafts,

        whole cities are swept away

    to perish in space, or the Flood

        that scalds to death when I bathe?

    Then, sooner or later, will dawn

        a Day of Apocalypse,

    when my mantle suddenly turns

        too cold, too rancid, for you,

    appetising to predators

        of a fiercer sort, and I

    am stripped of excuse and nimbus,

        a Past, subject to Judgement.