![[story/poem in 150 characters by Kent Pitman]](files/raped1234498611.gif)
Background
This is not a traditional-style Valentine’s Day poem.
I originally wrote this as prose, years ago, for submission to another forum, one that had solicited for various categories of extremely short stories, including a call for stories of no more than 150 characters. This one uses 146 characters, just so you don’t have to count. My submission was rejected by the editors of that other forum, and I shelved it for a time.
As I finally publish it, I thought perhaps the juxtaposition of today (Friday the 13th of February, 2009) and tomorrow (Valentine’s Day) would offer readers a chance to reflect on the notion that not all love stories are played out with chocolate hearts and red roses.
To my surprise, a friend who once previewed this work referred to it as a poem rather than a short story. On reflection, I decided that almost anything so textually short was at risk of being thought of in such a way. Rather than fight it, I embraced the idea and broke the lines in free verse style. But you may refer to it either way, as prose or poem, with my thanks for taking the time to read it at all.
By the way, the photo and artistic composition are my own work as well.
If you got value from this work, please “rate” it.
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Comments
Very emotive. sometimes the shortest pieces can pack the most punch...
Each time I read it... I think of something else.
I'm not sure, but I think that's good. (rated)
waking, I'm glad you enjoyed it! I think “kind” is not a word I expected to hear about it, but I can see now that you say it that it has a place. :)
Catamite, glad to know you approve the “poem” view. As you and o'steph point out, it's quite distilled in this form. Whittling it down to so short a piece certainly focuses one on removing anything that isn't serving the message.
I like how this raised so many complicated emotions in me. It's a hard lesson to learn, that sometimes we have to knowingly reach through pain to get to the love. It's sad that not everyone learns it, though art like this will help.
Harp, indeed, sharp is a good word, too. I have been using “dark” but that's not really right, and it probably explains why I was surprised (but pleased) when waking used “kind.” And I'm glad it allows mutiple reads productively.
visceral and heartbreaking.
Sandra, I'm so glad you stopped by. Sorry about the stinging. I should have had Kleenex® handy. I'm glad the complexity of it comes through, or perhaps it's just that the fingerprints of complexity that can never be spoken are enough to cue the reader to what can't really be said but that is ultimately little more than shared evidence of independently held matching secrets.
This a beautifully emotive piece you've written. It's been said that the more succinct the expression is the more thought and heart went into it.
Rated.
Really, the kindness stunned me.
Thanks, as always, for sharing.
Karin and Lea, cool you both mentioned the font. I went through every font on my system (and I have a lot of them) to find one that had that discordant feeling, so I'm glad that got notice since that was one of the only recent additions to the work (the words having come from long ago, all I was doing was graphics yesterday).
Dennis, right—there's an old joke about someone having written a long PhD and saying if he had more time he'd have written less. I feel that all the time. It's one of the reasons I like haiku and other short works. The highly constrained form allows me to focus lots of energy on a small space and really nail it. But that energy on a longer piece would be too exhausting.
(And rated.)
Saturn, funny but when Harp used the word “sharp” earlier, I wasn't even realizing he meant a synonym for “showy” or “spiffy”—I was just thinking “pointy,” but your explicit mention of its two senses clarified that. It is indeed storm clouds in the background. I had a picture with ground elements in it, but I realized they were not contributing and cropped them out in order to focus on the only relevant aspect. So good to see these things come through.
Anni and Without, thanks, too!
The woman's offer is not simple. She offers three gifts: her body, the prospect of physical pleasure, and her own suffering, and the suffering is the most intimate gift because the knowledge of the suffering is under her control.
As in many romantic stories, the man has to prove himself worthy of the woman. In this case the man proves himself worthy by not only being aware of her suffering, but also by taking her suffering, her pain, upon himself.
Ultimately, I think the poem is not about sex but about the willing acceptance of another person's suffering.
And in sharing and honoring the woman's suffering the man redeems her, shows her that she is worthy of love, that she isn't "damaged goods."
The Russian Orthodox priest Anthony Bloom often talked about suffering. He said that "In itself, suffering is not redemptive. Suffering is redemptive only if it's connected with love."
One of my favorite authors, Catholic mystic Miguel de Unamuno, said that "There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness."
In your poem the man willingly chooses love, suffering, and pain, and understands that all of these are gifts.
So there's a lot going on here, and I'm sure that I have only scratched the surface. It is very profound, and in just five lines you have given me a lot to reflect on. Thanks for posting.
Thank you for posting it, Kent. You make powerful use if every word.
It is viseral and brings thoughts to the fore......
And, like Mishma, who's comments I appreciated a lot, I heard a lot in these few words.
A real life friend of mine is a guy named Chris Wiman who edits Poetry Magazine. I asked him once if he understood everything he publishes. I can't remember the exact response, but I believe it was something along the lines of "Hell no!" A good poem leaves you wanting more. Like this one does.
Perhaps it is my personal history, and that I can only imagine what it is like for a man to love a rape survivor, but this seems more thoughtful than most of the men I encountered while working as a rape crisis counselor. And not much is written on their behalf.
m, thanks. As I think of it, people write a lot about this or that emotion but some of the pieces I personally like best are the ones that mix them, since often indeed emotions are not all of a kind. They must be factored, each of the parts accounted for. But the situations from which they are drawn are (to follow the mathematical analogy) a composite, the product of various prime factors. I can tell from these comments I achieved that mix I so value in others' work, which means I hit my target.
psychomama, I'm touched to think the work will bring you some comfort and sustenance.
Susanne, I suspect you're right that it's an underserved market, the male side of this. Men don't talk a lot this way, and it's difficult to talk about it because it implicates someone's privacy, the privacy of the person they are trying to help, in many cases to go into much detail.
Sally, yes, I think there's a strong trust element that is complicated to build up. It's not overt, but it is implied. The situation described is a triumph of trust in the same sense as Karen Novak's post today where she writes: “I feel like crap in the old familiar crappy viral way and inching in the ordinary fashion toward evicting its ass. You cannot begin to imagine the sense of triumph.”
Most amused by your surprise, in going from prose to a poem. The composition looks solidly like a poem to me. (At some level, you need to ask: what do those categories even mean, anyway?) Besides just being short and high density of content, the repeated sentence structure in the first four lines would be unusual in conversation or ordinary prose.
The repetition itself, the unusual grammar, the overall length, and the density of content: four attributes which all say "poem" to me.
(Just read it again: regardless of form, nice work!)
hyblaean, you too.
cartouche, no problem about late arrival. i'm subscribed to the thread. too bad OS doesn't have ability for others to subscribe, but at least authors can.
Don, good thoughts on metrics for what is poetry. Were I programming a poetry recognizer (e.g., for a web spider), I'd probably go with similar techniques. And I did notice, after the fact, the similarity of structure. Certainly a book done in that form would be taken for poetry... well, Shakespeare did it and they called it poetry, even when read aloud without the line break cues. You can often tell the nobles from the commoners by who's got those poetic qualities that transcend typography. Thanks!