writer in residence (poem)
Content Warning: This is a poem about anxiety and it includes frightening imagery and descriptions of intrusive thoughts. Reader discretion is advised.
There’s an unemployed ghost in my brain
who wants to write a horror flick
In a mouldy nest of typewritten scripts she sits
legs askew, dry fingers pressed to clacking keys
setting the score, advancing the action, raising the stakes
a disorienting dutch angle, a perfectly cut scream.
She bursts in when I’m walking the dog, taking the subway
lying in bed. She paces frantically, hair like rotting leaves,
eyes ringed and flickering static-grey, pages tremoring in her hands,
reads me her newest draft, whether I want to hear it or not.
In each one, a new and creative tragic demise for me
and everyone I love. A crazed axe-wielding slasher stumbling
from a dark alley, a step backward onto the metro tracks
a terminal diagnosis, a sudden aneurysm, fade to black.
“What if you were poisoned and everyone thought
you were dead, but you woke up in your coffin? Imagine
your fingers ripped down to the bone from
trying to scratch your way out.”
“What if you forgot to blow out the candle before you left
for the evening? What if the tiny jasmine-scented thing
turned your apartment into a raging inferno? We hear the terrified cries
of your dog, then cut to you ordering another beer.”
“What if your taxi driver kidnapped and raped you?
What if you hurled yourself over that balcony?
What if you lost your mind and couldn’t remember who you were?
What if you woke up next to your love and found his body cold and still?
What if your city was bombed? What if your friends were murdered?”
She’s been writing these stories for years.
I have to say, she’s getting pretty good.
She used to craft the screenplays for my childhood nightmares.
They were more abstract back then, a bit too heavy on the archetypes.
But now she’s moved beyond the old cliches - teeth falling out,
being chased by dogs. She gets imaginative.
Sometimes I don’t die. Instead she leaves me stranded
in a desert of guilt and grief, a barren and un-liveable landscape
where death looks like a cool glass of relief.
Sometimes she pulls the fabric of reality out from under me
Like the table cloth in that party trick.
Leaves me gasping, spinning, a vertiginous reveal.
She loves to make me the unreliable narrator.
She knows how to twist the knife - a true master of the genre.
She knows what I love and what I’m afraid to lose.
There’s never a happy ending.
Her stories used to keep me up at night,
before I knew what they were.
But now I’ve seen her face,
her tattered dress of human skin,
the curve of her spine, heard the
desperate ticking of those keys.
What do you do about a ghost who just wants
to write a bespoke horror film for you to star in?
How do you reason with this wild-eyed
wannabe Stephen King? This daughter of darkness?
This unshowered, sallow-faced visionary
in her windowless garret?
I’ve asked her to stop.
“Please, your stories are just
a bit too freaky* for me.”
She just glared and said,
“How did you know my name?”
I get the feeling she’s been doing this
for a long time. Before she had that typewriter,
she drew pictures on a cave wall of me
being ripped to ribbons by a tiger.
She’s cast me again and again,
bloodied by a bayonet, crushed
under the wheels of a carriage,
consumed by tuberculosis.
What can I do but step away quietly,
shut the door and let her write?
The universe hasn’t bought the rights to any of it yet.
The universe writes it’s own plot anyway.
She’s a old ghost and
well, they are only stories
after all.
*Phrike (pronounced like "freaky") is the spirit of horror in Greek mythology.