Cavities

This poem describes how intense physical suffering (toothache) that results from poverty can result in a clear and cutting analysis of one's own failures.

O. my. g.g .g.Od......

     it hurts soooow ow ow wow bad.

Small cradle of sharp white bone

    harboring decay

                brown and black

                       inside

          little whelp of bone like a cracked rock

           festooned

                                  along the inlet of my mouth

                      anchored

                                     to the throbbing, volcano gumline

             A millstone of agony. Pulling on my nervous lip that used to wear

               A                           E................

                    S                 L

                           M   I

My feet push, strained across the bedroom carpet

      pushshshshsh out from my chair, draw back in, pushshshshshs back out

                           trying to dispense the pain, push it into soft yarn carpet

    soft yarn carpet                  soft yarn carpet                 soft yarn carpet

The flawless white of the window frame--a painful enamel

                          <All the sharp angles>

        !

Every thought is subdued far below the aching tooth,

     just a drowning whisper beneath screaming red gums

Nerves down to the root of my problem

                  screaming

    almost obliterate me.

         My head aches,

(below the skin, the skull is made of throbbing BONE.)

   my muscles pull my self closer

              to myself.

Over the drone of a perpetual moan

   I hear my mother, what she'd say when I was small

       in our mildew bathroom,

           our hard-water-stained sink (rust in our toilet bowl),

           struggling with me on her lap,

           fighting my mouth, my (WORDS!), with a toothbrush:

    “The world looms ahead of you. You  want to be an astronaut. Now brush.”

And one sharp thought rises above the ceaseless ache:

That when this pain ends,

The World will still loom ahead of me,

My life has taken orbit

       around a dead tooth,

and there will still loom a Cavity.

Reviews

[Horizon K.]

Wow, this was totally fantastic. The word play and the way it is formatted made it super fun to read. I really love the ending (last 5 lines).

[victoria]

quite remarkable write, your words the symptomatic details so precisely to the absorbing reader,tangible. Your presentation lent itself wonderfully to the building drama as I was transported back knowing of how you feel , felt my heart swell, for there is no pain quite like it. Some wonderful wonderful lines , this one I could fee the tension ''Every thought is subdued far below the aching tooth,
just a drowning whisper beneath screaming red gums''
To me personally the ending serves a sense of having overcome and there is something in that. Much enjoyed poem that is about so much more than toothache.

[James William Dyer]

Please forgive formatting discrepencies. Apparently developing software that converts standard word documents into XHTML is too difficult for the developers. In reality, it's a simple programming concept. And a very important one to consider if you're hosting a poetry website, but then again, I'm just having a b***h of a morning.

[KAOlmsted]

f*****g hell, and I thought I was in a mood! *laugh*

[James William Dyer]

never mind, you can't position it in this s****y software. the word is S M I L E and it is literally forming a U-curve, to make a loppsided smile. But this two-bit HTML conversion software they're using can't handle it. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[James William Dyer]

This software sucks. OK, the capitalized letters starting on line thirteen, should look like this

A E
S L
M I