NaPoWriMo Day 11: Self-Love

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” by Ocean Vuo …

• Prompt

• By the way…

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Take inventory of your body. What does it contain? Answer this question in concrete imagery. Don’t just give me body parts, give me ideas and images that your body contains 

Poem: “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” by Ocean Vuong

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls.
Here's the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red trip wire.
Don't worry. Just call it horizon
& you'll never reach it.
Here's today. Jump. I promise it's not
a lifeboat. Here's the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty out of.
Don't be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing. Ocean. Ocean —
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here's
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here's a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here's a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake —
& mistake these walls
for skin.

I’m drawn to poems that are radically honest. Perhaps I’m drawn to them because I find them so refreshing. In a culture oversaturated with irony, earnestness feels all the more necessary. I need poems that stare unflinchingly at what hurts, even when it would be so much easier to sweep pain under a rug of insouciance.

So I’m drawn to how this poem engages with self-hatred, even when the poem itself is an attempt at self-love. Vuong has a richly metaphoric way of representing this tension: the spine evolved to abandon its wings; the house of childhood whittled down to a red trip wire; gunfire as an attempt at survival, which is what this poem is, really—the Sisyphean task of standing up every time you fall.

In between these stark images are moments of intense beauty. These moments in particular stick with me:

• The end of the road is so far ahead
  it is already behind us.
  

• You asked for a second chance
  & are given a mouth to empty out of.
  

• The most beautiful part of your body
  is where it's headed. & remember,
  loneliness is still time spent
  with the world.

I notice how the speaker’s body is transmogrified into a bag of beautiful things, whether it’s his mother’s shadow or his future possibilities. I notice, also, the moment where sex becomes an act of self-discovery, how the poem treads that thin line between violence and pleasure.

Here, then, is a poem of failing. A poem that evolves as people do, solving old problems and developing new ones, embarking on a quest that always changes—the quest of loving yourself in a world that doesn’t want you to. And it is so gloriously real and honest.

Prompt

I’ll give you two different prompts, each of which is informed by both your freewrite and Vuong’s poem.

1. Write a poem in which the speaker tries to love themselves. Be willing to engage with darkness and pain, and turn to your freewrite to find beauty and transformation.

2. Write a poem where you construct yourself through an inventory of bodily accessories. Take the metaphors, images, and symbols from your freewrite, and sculpt them into a different way of understanding your selfhood.

By the way…

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