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Dissociation – a piece written for Glass Half Full Theatre’s weekly challenge for playwrights

Glass Half Full Theatre asked for a two minute monologue containing ten spesific words, and even when this wasn’t chosen as the weekly monologue, they did enjoy reading it – so you might, as well. Ten words underneath the piece.

DISSOCIATION

Brush teeth. Gargle. Make a pot of coffee. Eat toast, but it tastes like cardboard, soggy with butter and I only drink coffee in the mornings because I learned it should be done.

A habit, a routine, a repertoire.

Sit down.

Stare.

This is the typical day.

But now I disappear. I have felt like this before. Like my essence was smoke from a chimney on top of my head, silently drifting out when passion burns inside the gut. I want you to love me, I want so desperately for you to love me.

I want to love you. But baby,

I don’t know how.

Brush teeth. Gargle. Make a pot of coffee. Eat toast, give up eating toast. Every food requires effort, and I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t eat because I feel hungry, I eat because

it’s a habit, a routine, a repertoire.

Sometimes I get into the car and drive around town, with no destination, accelerate toward the ocean and the bend of the road, press the brakes two seconds too late and pant on the edge, knowing that if the car had gone an inch further, I’d be drowning, kicking the doors, fists bouncing off the windows and then, silence… and the tire of the car hits a round pebble deep within blue, we bounce once, and it’s peace.

The chimney is gone, then. My essence is here. I love you. I love you so much. On that edge, when the world is ending, I can hold your hand.

And then your eyes, passion, chimney on top of my head. Smoke puffing away. My body retreats in the nook. Brush teeth, gargle,

the neighbours have decorated with streamers, I drift through the colours

disappear.

Ten words to include:

Town
Pebble
Baby
Streamers
Typical
Car
Gargle
Nook
Passion
Drive

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The Secret

How is it January already? I was planning on taking a week away from the blog, but time, it sometimes just disappears while you are wandering.

Also, still not really getting back to this, just sharing some other work I did while not posting in the blog. Here’s a video of a poem written for the fundraiser for Samaritans organized by Eva’s Echo Theatre:

Last Day of November – and the last poem for now

I started to write this blog around 4th of November with the aim to write a poem every day. I skipped one day, but just because everything outside where I live was too beautiful to even try and think about how to reach anything similar with words. What I have learned is that I feel very insecure about posting things this often, as some of them are far from thought-through, but that it’s also very liberating – I quite like making and keeping promises, it’s one of the biggest freedoms of human life, as long as you are aware of your limits in making them. Also, writing every day does make you a better writer, as doing voice exercises does good for your voice and so on. Many skills of artists’ are muscles, and many things we think are undoable in the world just take many repetitive muscles, or humans.

As for now, this is the last poem. In December, I will be posting some material from my upcoming book in Finnish, and was also thinking of taking some of these poems and dissecting them for editing purposes here – but we’ll see. I would also really like to publish some of my academic writing as I never seem to have time to figure out a way to get those out anywhere, and I actually think they should be read and challenged and thought about. Also, those are already written so I can just copy and paste them! Anyway, here it goes – back in few days. (And oh look, it’s both a written version and a video!)

Thanks for all who have been reading, you genuinely make me very happy!

Villages and cities

I’m very much in two’s. I have two home countries, other by birth, other because I feel like I belong there – or because I chose it. I have two languages (although I do get by with German and Swedish as well, but would not dream of writing poetry in either of them). I have two different sides to my head, due to the other side being cut short and other growing long – and the short side is blonde and the long red. As for the kind of places where I have lived, it’s a bit more than two, but the more I grow the more I want to be in smaller neighbourhoods, villages, places where people know each other – not in cities. So for the purpose of this poem, I made it two as well.

Image credit: Pixabay

On being unfinished

One of the reasons I love poetry is it’s ability to address and communicate in-betweens – the moments of change, the processes, the insecurity I always find trying to explain human experience and its correlations to reality with mere speech. We were chatting about this the other day, and one of the most obvious examples is Columbus and how he “found” America, thinking it was India. Within his little bubble of experience, it was a new world – but it is sad when one human experience begins to define the world for others, as well.

Of course it happens in smaller scale more often than on the scale of finding “new worlds”. It’s the moments when you sit talking shite about someone, and through your bad experience of this person you make others more likely to accept that that experience would be who they are. Or the moments when you are enthusiastic about something you just realized and explain it to everyone as if it was the first time this has ever occured. Or when theatre-makers, myself included, describe their projects as “something no one has ever done before” when it should be “something I have never done before”.

And it’s fine. Most things in life are totally fine. It’s very human to live through one’s own experience, and you should never try and get rid of that. But I think that the more we remember that is ours, that our firsts are our firsts and our quarrels with others are our quarrels with others and not how they are, the more we find self-harmony – and become able to accept the insecurity and quirkiness of the world, and see other people as unfinished processes we all are, as well as our selves. For me, accepting that rawness is accepting growth, and embracing life – as my therapist once said to me “if you would be ready, would you be alive anymore?”

Busy day

26th of November has been a rather busy day – I’ve been talking with the graphic designer of my upcoming book, made calls over some other productions (two of my plays are being produced currently) and then accidentally ended up taking a long walk instead of a short one before enjoying Coney’s The Magic Trick , a performance event online. I had lots of fun with that one, and might work with a poem related to it tomorrow.

However, I only got around today’s blog post at 11pm, and my thoughts are quite scrambled. Full of wonderful sentences but none of them seem to make any sense. So, the following poem is completely unedited collection of whatever springs to my mind at the precise moment of writing this.

There were avalanches of butterflies
above us as we,
upside-down, stood on the downside of the clouds
like raindrops waiting for the go
to fall.

I wanted to let go
to surge into that colourful mess above our heads
but the raindrop next to me was terrified
there were tsunamis of flowers on top of us
and hurricanes of sediment and ground

beneath our feet, the gentle white
turning heavy and gray because we were
afraid now.

I fully support men in suitcases

I want to make it known that even if this poem seems to indicate I had something against men in suitcases (not to be confused with me with suitcases), I totally believe in the power of imagination and this poem rose out of the thought that if, indeed, there was a man in a suitcase, how would he have ended up in there?

Feel free to comment any suggestions!