NaPoWriMo Day 17: Striving Towards Life

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Reasons Not to Die” by Fargo Tbakhi

• Prompt

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.

I’m going to give you a series of short prompts. Respond to each prompt briefly—1-3 sentences, or no more than 1 minute of writing for each question. Don’t “think” about your answer, just write what immediately comes to mind.

• What is the song your body sings, and who can hear it? 

• What is something you will never do again? 

• How will you resist your annihilation today?

• Whose name does your heart whisper in its sleep?

• Name something that’s beautiful, but no one else sees its beauty. 

• What is the shape of your grief?

• What are you the world’s foremost scholar of?

• Hold your dreams in your hands. What do they feel like? 

• How will you choose to celebrate your strange, fantastic life? 

Poem: “Reasons Not to Die” by Fargo Tbakhi

borrowing a line from Walt Whitman

because there’s always one week where there is a nightmare.

because the boundaries of a city are the friendships we made

along the way.

because i don’t like my thighs. you do.

because the vending machine gave me an extra missile.

because someone kisses my cheek at night and i know they’ll be there

at dawn.

because dinosaurs had lovers too, before the asteroid settled in.

and what are you a doctor of, archeology or physics?

the trauma, or the blunt force?

because god gave me hands to squeeze, fingers to mouth.

because my twitter timeline holds a secret only i can find.

shhh- don’t tell.

because on maps, the distance has a way of seeming surmountable-

the topology of loss doesn’t want to be a line.

because i’m singing, all at once and right on key.

because the temple, the grandeur, the slicing of the tendon.

because the tree turned upside down,

the roots turned branches, all the leaves crammed under dirt,

suffocating.

i’m writing trees because i’m sick of trying to make corpses

lovely.

i guess i’ll just song of myself again: I wish I could translate

the hints about the dead young men and women.

because maybe this time i will find only the one corpse beside me

at dawn. his lips latched onto my cheek.  

dinosaurs, the both of us, waiting for the end of everything.

I try to include poems that challenge me or sit outside of what I’m comfortable with, and this poem is a good example of that. It’s not “poetic” in the sense that its language is not incessantly musical; it’s not “continuous” in the sense that it does not tells a linear story. The lines are disjointed, some are even a tad cliche, and the meaning of the work isn’t readily apparent, but that’s all the more reason to engage with it.

What I do appreciate in this poem is its radical honesty, a phrase I’ve probably used a few times already this month. When the poem’s title is striving for life, I appreciate when the poem itself doesn’t quite stick the landing—I mean, that first line about nightmares doesn’t exactly answer the title’s implied question. But then I’m met with an opportunity to look deeper, to ask questions. Without nightmares, there are no good dreams, in the same way that light can’t exist without darkness.

Just as often in this poem are moments of surprise, like the vending machine of missiles or the asteroid “settling in.” A lot of expectations are subverted in this poem: we expect innocence and are met with danger, expect danger and are met with something softer, if just as pernicious. I think, perhaps, the answer to the title is in that aspect of craft: the reasons not to die are just as unexpected as life itself.

And then there are some lovely poetic bits in this piece, such as the one-lined “suffocating,” followed, two lines later, by the one-lined “lovely.” Or this line:

because the temple, the grandeur, the slicing of the tendon.

Or this line:

dinosaurs, the both of us, waiting for the end of everything.

Do I find concrete, tangible meaning? Not necessarily. But do I feel the desire for life pulsing underneath these images? Absolutely. And if an image alone can answer the poem’s title, imagine what other answers poetry can provide.

Prompt

Think about a source, or sources, of suffering in your life. Write a poem that pushes back on that suffering—that chooses resilience.

Use your responses to the short prompts to guide you towards this resilience. If you want to challenge yourself, try to use every line you wrote in the poem you draft.