Scifi, Monsters, and Survival:
Author Ariele Sieling’s Blog
Brain fog. We’ve all had it.
This is my poem about brain fog preventing me from writing.
There’s a dinosaur in my brain.
It eats my gray matter for lunch,
and then spits it back up,
mixing it back into what was there before.
So, if I can’t remember your name,
or where I parked my car
or what I ate yesterday,
it’s because there’s a dinosaur in my brain.
I’ve been obsessed with time for a long … time (see what I did there?) and I’ve spent a lot of … time … trying to visualize what “time” would look like if it were a 3D object.
Most of my thoughts come down to… a sphere. In space.
Because I could, I asked MidJourney to make me a sphere in space, and…
This was the closest I could get. It’s a cool image, but not exactly what I see in my mind.
I also asked ChatGPT/Dalle3 to imagine what time would look like as a 3D object, and I have to admit, this is pretty cool:
Anyway, here is what I wrote a couple years ago—time envisioned in poetry.
She is young, wrinkles, joints
patience
She is old, tight curls and excitement
At once a child and a mother and a grandmother
At once renewed and running out
At once beautiful
worn grace hope fatigue
scarred growth weakness
strength fear fierce
She is all of her at once
Over the last few years, I’ve read a lot of craft books and attended a lot of workshops. And many craft books and workshops come with exercises!
This poem came from an exercise in which the instructor instructed (that’s an example of polyptoton!) us to imagine ourselves as an image. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember which book or workshop this poem came from. All I remember was that I was supposed to write 500 words of prose about myself (so probably from a book/class on memoir/personal essay and I’ve read/taken quite a few of those), but I thought that sounded boring so I wrote a poem instead so I could say I “did” the assignment, and then I went and worked on fiction for the rest of the time I’d allotted for the exercise.
Anyway, whenever I think about myself from an imagery perspective, I almost always come up with a field or a forest, a stream or a wandering path. So it’s not surprising that this is the poem that arose.
When I think of myself, I think of
wandering
meandering
wending and weaving
a relaxed stroll
drifting along
a wide open sky
field stretching out
waving grass
quivering aspen leaves
a winding river
babbling bubbling cheerful
and long
a lifetime
I accept this
Remember 2020? Heh. As if.
The first year of Covid was a weird time. I canceled all my events, rebuilt my business and marketing plan, and you guessed it, stayed home. I also quit drinking, built a new workout routine, and catapulted headfirst into my art, which turned into my primary coping mechanism to get through 2020 and 2021.
At the time, Josh and I lived in Baltimore in an 1100 square foot townhouse with three cats and a dog the size of a person. We were both working from home, and early on in the city, we were afraid to even go for walks in the very busy city parks, because everyone else was working from home too. Not to mention, in the early days, we didn’t have tests (at home or at the doctor’s office), we didn’t know how it spread, and we didn’t know how to protect ourselves, let alone how to protect others from us.
Everything was a mystery.
And so we stayed home.
The isolation was new to me. Though I’m an introvert and managed it well, I was not by any means immune to its effects. This poem reflects the new emotions I was grappling with—not just the aloneness from the separation from my community contrasted with the strangeness of having Josh around all the time, but the the sense of togetherness knowing everyone else was doing the same thing. All that, plus inability to rectify the feelings; the inability to know what to do with it all. It is an acknowledgement of this new type of aloneness that I’d never experienced before.
And so we stay home
We stay alone
We are separate, but in this together
Isolated, but never alone
Always alone and
never alone
alone alone alone
It’s strange to be alone
but also not alone
Either way, it’s
better than dead.
Anyone who’s been around for a while knows I’m obsessed with philosophy. Specifically, I’m obsessed with absurdity, which is a (not) subset of existentialism and written about by Albert Camus in his book The Myth of Sisyphus. You may also be familiar with Camus’s novels, The Stranger and The Plague. In my opinion, The Stranger is more about reaching absurdism through (really weird) lived experience, and how a person might get there intellectually. The Plague is a sort of exploration about how absurdism manifests across a range of people with different lived experiences, and how different types of people deal when facing absurdity. Some reach for religion, some create their own meaning, and some just keep shoving that rock uphill.
Anyway, obviously I’m going to have some poems about philosophy.
This one is specifically about absurdism, and grappling with the meaninglessness of life in the context of absurdism.
The desperate desire
craving
yearning
to know why—
Isn’t it absurd
in the context of
infinity
eternity
to presume that something
as small as I
would ever know
why?
The relentless dissonance
resounds in my mind:
the yearning to know
that which is unknowable—
because it does not exist.
