Scutigera Coleoptrata: The House Centipede in My Head

shiver

I’ve been inspired to write a poem about anxiety. A scholar named Tony Hoagland wrote a neat article in the Writer’s Chronicle this month about the role of images in poetry that I think could make a good reading for the next time I teach poetry if I ever get to. He suggests not only focusing on image, but on using “orality” or manipulation of sound in language, and then making the images have a particular connection to place. So I decided to commemorate this past few weeks, which have contained all the stress that a midterm possibly can, by starting to draft a poem along those constraints.(Hoagland mentions Keats' "Ode on Melancholy" as a great example.)

It does look like I’ll keep my job for another semester, which is great. But just after that welcome resolution, I had a stack of midterm papers – all students in all classes – to get to before our vacation out West. The vacation was a good stress, until we looked over our budget upon return, and it became a bad stress. Add this to the coming around of my student loan (I won’t say how much, but it’s more than you would imagine in your worst fears.). Poverty is a never-ending albatross for us. Add this to my interview with Collin College, scheduled two days after returning for work, which involved flying to and from Dallas, TX in a single day. Guess how well I did on that interview. Now I sit under another stack of papers which need to be done in time for next week’s round of student conferences. These double my week’s workload by the way. Bring on the anxiety nightmares.

me: last week

Those sweaty, strenuous dreams are the basis of the images in the beginning – and very rough draft – of “Scutigera Coleoptrata,” my tentatively titled poem-to-be. In future drafts, I will incorporate more recent dreams…thinking of keeping a dream journal by the bed. Because man, I have some whoppers, and plenty of insomnia-time to write them down.

Maybe you’ll recognize some of these.

Scutigera Coleoptrata

The house centipede’s dorsal plates are wedged staunchly between my incisors.

They feel like corn nuts.

I’m stepping over piles of overcoats in a demolished parking garage

draped in vestments of black plastic. I can’t catch up.

I find a sickly feral kitten, ash-colored, blind, bloated with zebra mussels.

Deep tunnel feculence daubs my knuckles. Milorganite hangnail!

I can’t find my aubergine kicks, my chartreuse scarf, my true black tankini.

The pool is closing!

The stairs to trigonometry wreathe and stoop. I am truant again.

I truckle inside an important municipal pipe outside Tracadero.

The crimson rodent skitters metallically outside waiting to eat me.

My steering column convulses and I veer off the ramp, careening from the interchange,

wrecking in the black-tailed prairie dog habitat.

My screams sound like revving.

Steeped in rennet, the moon ignites, flickers, plummets into the skyline.

City hall goes dark and my mother won’t stop whining.