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Calling the Samaritans is hard—
every each of the double holding tones a judgment:
you don’t deserve this.
Last night Vivien called them and then hung up and
this morning it was me and
I guess that’s all fine since nobody died and
we’ll have each other until we
hate each other (or even thereafter) but
Last night Vivien called them because they
wanted to not exist, because they keep tearing
bits of themselves out to
feed flames that grow more and more—those
INGRATES who dare to be called their family,
who are
held together on one back
(and hate my
precious sib for that).
They had
bawled to me last night (and
it infects me even now/still).
My sweet sib, how have they made you small?
You who are overflowing with and made of UN
RE
LENT
ING
good—who are they to break you, what
the fuck? You: Strong, always on,
and perfect, always
[needing to be]
perfect, whimpering through the phone
hei i think i need help, this time is
different, i don’t know, i’m scared
as I try to find you my least useless words as the
uber darts through empty streets
but not quickly enough.
You said:
hei I’m scared I’m
too broken for lise and they’ll
run away.
I said:
vivien, you are so much
more than your hurt and your
pain.
You tell me that you think this is it
I say:
not yet not yet
wait for me
we’ll fix it [?]
My sib, why are you always trying
to see the best in complete human garbage?
(Admittedly, I’m glad you did [with me].)
Fuck your family [and fuck me].
—(If I were a better friend
I could have better helped.)—
In the background of my mind swims an Echo:
you’d said: “I might need to call for some
help.”
help
help?
Act II:
Last night after they had calmed down, after
scrabble, chilli cashews, and tiktok browsing,
they fell asleep in bed with me. I couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t until I got home the next morning
in my shower
that I collapsed in tears.
(In truth
I had wanted this
proof that my love is not
performative.)
But they can’t see me like
this, or they’ll never call me
when they need me
again—
so I called the Samaritans:
beep-beep beep-beep.
beep-beep beep-beep.
(I hung up after a minute
because I do not deserve this.)
ASIDE: What kind of sick fetishist am I
to find you beautiful as you cry?
(whimpering through the phone, you had said
[now replaying as an Echo]:
hei I’m scared
please tell lise
i trust you)
The more I see of your hurt the more I
feel the strength that had held all this inside.
Who
The
FUCK did they think they were talking to?
To you? A god? A goddess? A king?
my sib Atlas i wish i could help you bear the
burden of these things, but you‘d
hate to even let me
wash
your
dirty
plates.
(when id asked, youd half-laughed: please dont
and i said: i know i know)
And I say now also: I know,
I know.
My sib, won’t you please be less perfect?
I’d rather a you that is flawed and more selfish
than one that’s faultless
and dead.
Act III: The Bonus Section—here’s the garbage part:
When we had lain together in bed,
you asleep, me restless neck-rolling and
stretching my feet, you shifted slightly over to my side
perhaps used to sleeping alone
(though in my head it was because you had felt
comfort in my warmth).
Technically
I was just making sure I had enough of the blanket
technically
you were over on MY side—
the reality is that I’d
desired it.
I eventually felt the slight pressure of your back
against my leg. Fuck me I feel dirty
that I’d enjoyed it. Even my limp T-deprived phallus
felt arousal for if only a few seconds. I wanted to
move away
but couldn’t
(or just didn’t want to).
(whimpering through the phone, you had said
[now replaying as an Echo]:
hei I’m scared
please
i trust you)
There I lay still even though we weren’t even barely touching.
Get over it, I told myself, go to sleep, think
nothing of it, and almost did, but then you
half awoke and saw me,
half yawned and half smiled (?) at me
and turned back to the other way
but didn’t move away—no,
you in fact snuggled up closer,
rolled slightly
over until my
thigh supported your
weight
until you were
squeezing into me
like a half hug
and I felt
safe?
But from what?
Safe you weren’t going to leave.
Safe that, in that early morning
unconscious and asleep,
you wanting to be close was no mistake.
Safe to not feel guilty to have
(not quite) touched you
when we wake.
(yet there it was, still,
replaying as an Echo:
)
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Hi Klis,
a rather long, but interesting read. And then came the 'bonus section'. That pretty much destroyed all the goodwill the previous sections had built up. So I'm going to ignore it entirely.
The erratic punctuation (assuming it's accidental rather than deliberate) is an issue. Put the effort in, don't make the reader do your work. Which leads to hei (l.31,37) - what is it? Is it, as it appears later in the piece, a name? Like lise? The (careless?) formatting is a real impediment in this regard.
I found phrases like 'every each' difficult at first, but then they grew on me. The poem has its own voice, and one that is worth defending. That said, if you're going to end lines on conjunctions etc (as you do in S1, then I think you should be consistent - that way S2 would begin
Last night Vivien called them because
they wanted to not exist, because
they keep tearing bits of themselves
out to feed flames that grow more and
more—those INGRATES
who dare to be called their family,
who are because they are
held together on one back held together one back (because
(and hate my they hate ...?
precious sib for that).
Is it 'who dare to be called' or should it be 'who dare to call themselves' ?
Not sure about the final 11 lines of Act I.
Or about the narrative in Act II.
When does N go to the sibs house? And why?
'Next morning' makes 'last night' redundant, or the other way around. Cut one.
Last night after they had calmed down, after
scrabble, chilli cashews, and tiktok browsing, after
they fell asleep in bed with me. After
I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t until After
I got home the next morning
in my shower that I collapsed
in tears.
No sure that the ASIDE really is an aside, it seems to flow out of the preceding
and i said: i know i know i know)
And I say now also: I know,
I know. I know
Aren't you missing an triple echo (help/help/help) opportunity here (and elsewhere)?
To you? A god? A goddess? A king? My Queen? my sib
Atlas i wish i could help you bear the
My sib, won’t you please be less perfect?
I’d rather a you that is flawed and more selfish
than one that’s you faultless
and dead.
This is a great ending, why on earth ruin it with the 'bonus section'?
Best, Knot
.
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Hey Knot! Very much appreciate you reading and commenting, I’d enjoyed reading your work. From what I’ve seen you write a very different style; I don’t claim to know the breadth of your style, but if this is true, then I especially appreciate that you’re willing to read and comment regardless.
A couple of things came up in the poem that I feel like would be useful to address. I hope to not be defensive in this, especially as this is quite a personal work. Rather than explaining it to justify its failings, I hope to make clear what sort of situation and dynamic I am trying to evoke. I would appreciate any thoughts you have on it, and where I might have given the wrong picture and so on.
I think there is convention around referring to the voice as the speaker instead of the author, but here I feel like any attempt at covering the obvious autobiographical nature of the poem is a bit silly, so I will just speak directly. A lot of the references are either personal or potentially niche to my personal experiences/community, but I’d like to draw an analogy here: even though the many references from The Wasteland or Ulysses can be explained and traced and indeed there is a lot of value in analysing it in those ways, they are also pieces of writing that are powerful in their own right when the reader isn’t understanding of all the references. I feel similarly about my writing, just that instead of literary references, it’s personal ones; you might have no idea about the people I am talking about exactly are, what their exact relationships are, but the vague sense and emotion of it is what I really want to capture.
“When does N go to the sibs house? And why?”
I guess I’ll just briefly explain what actually happened. They wanted to kill themselves, tried to call the samaritans, was afraid the samaritans would call an ambulance and their biological family would find out, to the point where they’d rather actually kill themselves than let them happen, hung up, managed to let me know what’s going on, was finally convinced to let me go to see them, I ubered over while keeping on the phone. Vivien needed to let their partner Lise know what’s happening, but didn’t want their last memories of them to be of them in a wreck, entrusted me to do it instead. I arrived, calmed them down, we did some mundane stuff, I slept over, they sort of cuddled me half asleep and I have weird feelings about it because I have romantic feelings for them. They got a bit better in the morning, I went home and broke down.
Like I said it’s not important that this is entirely factually clear, just that the general mood of the situation is captured.
Not sure if it’s obvious to you but sib is short for sibling, and it implies “chosen family” juxtaposing against Vivien’s biological family. Hei is my name, and is a fairly common Chinese one. It’s got some personal significance here that might be a bit self indulgent but I think the vibe of it would be picked up by some readers; names are pretty delicate matters for people like us. As both a diaspora and a trans person, my Chinese birth/deadname has some unnameable power to it and is not entrusted to just anyone. It’s not a name I go by publicly or allow most people to use for me, and even they don’t usually use it, so it’s a significant and intimate choice. I had the following stanza that I removed because it felt a little too unrelatable:
btw: You had picked which of my
names to use
perfectly—how did you do it?
I have so many, 3, 4?
6 if you count the
dead, yet somehow you had
said the perfect
Hei I think
I might need to call for some help
words that
>crushed<
me
with a certainty—
Let me be there for you
please [!]
Perhaps it would actually be better if I had kept it, and it would explain it? Hm.
Lise is a relatively common Scandanavian name I think. I recognise the choice to have these names in lower case might be confusing. I am considering whether I want to remove some of these personal references (my current version has removed Lise, I think I would retain Hei thoughi).
This poem is meant to be performed as well as engaged with as text on the page. Some of these things (like that stanza) may change or be redacted depending on the context in which they are to be read or performed, and that instability is something that does not bother me.
The gist of the “tell lise” line is that I had been entrusted the duty to relay to them what is happening or might happen to Vivien. This I treat as a sacred sort of duty and a sign of utmost trust, that they trust me to relay this more than they trust themself. Each echo of those lines (the last one being unwritten, with the formatting of the parentheses only to hint at it*) comes with a greater sense of guilt of feeling like I’d betrayed that trust, not for having actually betrayed it per se, but for having ulterior motives in helping. I try to show a slow degradation of what is at first a sense of unflinching duty for a loved one, into a corrupted memory.
*these lines, in performance, would be accompanied with hand gestures, with the last one mouthed soundlessly with said gestures. Here in the text the parentheses is used instead to create a similar effect.
I should add that as far as I know there are no typos in the poem and all the grammatically incorrect choices and punctuation are intentional. Of course, whether they are effective or not is another question. I don’t want to imply “it’s experimental poetry” is a valid excuse for poor artistic choices, but they are, in fact, intentional. A lot of them give the tone and feel that would be communicated through performance. For instance, degeneration from normal punctuation to everything being lower case is my attempt at creating contrast between my (vindicated/righteous) sense of anger to more guilty feelings, as if I am making myself small so I cannot be seen, found out. To indicate quotations. To show racing thoughts, like the second stanza where I basically had to stop myself and restart the thought because I had gotten off topic.
This is a good time to address “Act 3”. You ask why I ruin the poem with this, by destroying good will. Well, because it’s the truth, I suppose. I suppose, for me because this is a poem of personal exploration, it would be gross and inauthentic for me to shape it to make myself look my best.
That’s all the justification I need for this choice personally, but I will say even from an artistic standpoint, I feel a flawed protagonist is far more interesting, not to mention the self denigrating tone of the entire poem hinged on it. The “reveal” serves to explain some of the guilty feelings earlier on that might otherwise seem a bit uncalled for, like “if I were a better friend, i could have better helped”, and the fact that I waited until the end to go back and explain what had happened is how I hope to give a sense of how guilty I had felt that I basically didn’t feel comfortable explaining until I had already expressed all the things I had actually done for them selflessly, like I am guiltily trying to gain the good will first before I reveal my “dark secret” so to speak.
And finally, now that I have greater distance from the events, I don’t particularly feel like I have done anything wrong.
Perhaps we have different norms around intimacy, but physical touch and quasi-romantic physical intimacy is fairly common to my circle even between non sexual partners, and considering I didn’t actually touch them or anything, it feels a bit puritan to me to say I was wrong for simply for having physical reactions to being touched by someone I loved and desire. After all, they, you know, were the one who snuggled up to me, not the other way around, and I don’t think I’m particularly obliged to stop them when touch is not inherently a sinful or invasive thing, and I obviously both consent to and couldn’t reasonably blame them for cuddling up half asleep. I know why I felt guilty--it’s because I have some traumatic feelings around my sexuality, desires, and body, but I’m not too sure if other people would think I should be guilty?
Do you mean that they are intimate as a result of the traumatic experience, and therefore, I was obliged to stop them from doing so, like the way it would be unethical to have sex with someone who’s clearly not mentally well? I feel like this sort of physical touch is not exactly the same thing, like they wouldn’t “regret it later” you know?
It could be we simply have different senses of morality and ethics around these things, or perhaps I did not present the situation very clearly, I’d be interested to hear.
I feel that if I ended with Act 2, it would be kind of a boring poem. Like, people are sad and angry about people they love going through shitty things all the time, but you know, it seems a bit more interesting to explore the conflict and interactions between sincere loving support and complicated selfish (?) feelings.
What I am trying to evoke is something more like the end of Schindler's List, something like survivor trauma, that even though my desires have not actually hurt them in any way, I feel guilty for getting any pleasure whatsoever out of their pain (“what kind of fetishist am I, to find you beautiful as you cry”). It feels wrong that not only am I not suffering as much as they do, but that I derive any sort of pleasure from being close to them and receiving their trust and affection. I don’t actually think that’s wrong of me, I suppose, but I feel/felt like it is/was.
Some small notes on choices I made:
“Is it 'who dare to be called' or should it be 'who dare to call themselves' ?”
I kinda really like this choice. Aside from the general sense of confusion and turmoil I try to create with the erratic formatting punctuation, randomish time skips and interjections, and what would be very very terrible phrasing if I were trying to communicate ideas clearly, little bit like this are quite important to the poem (though again that doesn’t necessarily mean they were good ones).
To “dare to be called” is different from “who dare to call themselves” because it puts the actual “blame” on Vivien. Not to say the family is not to blame (lol) but what I am actually angry at is not simply that they are awful abusive assholes, but that Vivien, as many abuse victims do, still cling to them as family despite what they put them through. Their crime isn’t simply for the things they do, but for making Vivien hurt themself with self-destructive choices (staying with abusers), which gives them a separate level of hell. It’s one thing to hurt someone, another to give them something like stockholm syndrome.
Maybe that doesn’t really come through that well, and I’ll think about how to make these ideas communicated better, but there are things in there that are important for me to keep.
The double “i know”, I didn’t think explicitly of it, but I don’t really want to echo the tripling of the other lines; those lines are said by Vivien, with very different emotions, so if anything it’s important for me to draw the distinction
The act thing and “aside”, are forced attempts at theatrical reference, which comes back to the “performativity” part. The speaker is trying to distance themself from what they are describing in the poem because of the immense guilt they feel (see what I did here? kek). Essentially I felt so bad about it, that I could only describe what had happened by framing it as some sort of dramatic fiction, even though it’s clearly autobiographical and word for word (the quotes and such).
“My queen”: I think it’s actually pretty important “my” or similar possessive is not used with the salutations the way “my sib” is used. Perhaps it’s interesting for me to say this consider your feelings about the other bit, but the differences is that “sib” is a consensually and explicitly established relationship, whereas a god/goddess/king both A) reflects my belief that their deity like aura is not something caused by my romantic feelings, but (should be) evident to everyone, and B) shows that this admiration and desire is not possessive in nature: I do not want to own them, I do not want them to shine for me solely, I just want them to shine the way they are meant to.
Also no “queen” because of specific and personal gender dysphoria stuff.
Anyway that’s like, a lot of explaining. Again I really hope this doesn't come off as defensive, and that if it does you’ll forgive me. Obviously this is a very personal poem to me, and that’s how I like it, but I do want to be able to analyse and work on it objectively as well and I appreciate your comments and help.
I am in the middle of rewrites and I will take your technical notes into account before posting an edit up. Thank you for those notes specifically as well.
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Hi Klis,
thanks for the detailed response. Very illuminating.
It was clear that it was a deeply personal work, bravo for daring to share it, and it's down to you (as it should be) as to how open or closed the work is to the reader.
I thought that the situation (your paragraph " what actually happened") was clear in the poem. Like I said I couldn't be certain how you came to be there though, and from a narrative viewpoint it bugged me. The options seemed to be either happenstance, you just called by, or that they (forgive me if I get the pronouns wrong, new to this) had called you. If it was the latter, and you say it was, then that suggests something about them, their mental state, and about you, and about the relationship the two of you have. Further reasons to be curious about the detail's omission, for me at least.
That sib was a contraction was clear, that it implied 'chosen family' was not (but, like I said, new to this, only just encountered 'deadname' for instance. Live and learn) - however, the nuance doesn't change the reading, so I'm not sure it's something you need to explain in the piece
Names. As you say "I recognise the choice to have these names in lower case might be confusing."
Perhaps put those parts where you lower case the names, the reported speech, in italics, to visually distinguish the from the rest?
Rereading in view of your reply I thought you were using colons as an marker for speech, but there's one in L27 which appears to be contradicted by the capital S of Strong, and not one at the end of L30.
unrelatable stanza - I rather like that verse, it encourages one to look more carefully at names (and may push 'sib' in the direction you intend) - though, of course, it depends where it fits into the piece.
Act III - I didn't doubt it was the truth. It had a ring of squirming awfulness about it that fairly screamed verisimilitude  I simply wondered if including it was serving the poet, rather than the poem, And, to be clear, any objections I had were not about it's content, but about its relevance to my understanding of what had happened in the poem up until that point. My personal reaction was that I wanted to be processing what I had just read and you were interrupting with something else. This may be a little blunt but, as a reader, my concerns were for Vivian, while you, in Act III, want me to focus on you.
Also, when you describe it as 'the garbage part' I'm inclined to take you at your (non-ironical) word
(and not look to further disambiguate the phrase to 'this is the part where I, the author, feel like garbage'). It leaves one feeling ever so slightly insulted, however unintentionally.
Anyway, were you to cut it from 'Calling the Samaritans' but keep it as a separate/companion/continuation piece (you've already got a title, 'Safe') what would be lost? Arguably, you might also gain from having the reader being able to return to 'Samaritans' with a new perspective and find extra layers/meanings in there that they missed before.
And finally, as I said before, Act II offers a much, much stronger ending to the poem than the whimpering Act III.
Good luck with the revision.
Best, Knot
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Thank you so much for your response again. It is very helpful and much appreciated.
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I'm very intrigued by your poem. It's ambitious and very (maybe too much so) fluid. I skimmed a bit of your explanantion, enough to read it again and come up with some suggestions. But honestly I did not read your explanation closely because I want to just experience the poem.
First off, I was unclear of even the speaker's gender and really was misled by the use of Sib. Your explanantion makes it clearer, but maybe needs to be in the poem for the reader too, in some way.
Hei really needs to be capitalized to make clear it's a name.
I don't understand why you refer to the 3rd section as "the garbage". It's true, it doesn't belong, but it could stand alone as another poem I think.
I like the jagged line structure and the challenge they present in reading the poem.
Some lines I simply did not understand:
l. 2 "every each of the double holding tones a judgment". (by the way, i really like the line)
ll. 14-15. "who are
held together on one back"
and just before the end of section 2;
"Who
The
FUCK did they think they were talking to?
To you? A god? A goddess? A king?'
I'm unclear who this is referring to both as to speaker and object of speaker)
Really I enjoyed all my readings even with the puzzles.
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