Thought I’d write my inner child a lullaby. This is my 20th villanelle.
A Lullaby
This poem fell out pretty quickly. I came into work about a week and a half ago to discover my schedule had been shifted dramatically. There is a part of me, a fairly large part, that always feels that I’ve just done something wrong and I’m about to be punished miserably for it. I’m pretty sure this is connected to the same part of me that, throughout my childhood, lived in sheer terror of dozens of unlikely events. Events like tidal waves (though living well inland), floods (though not living near a river or flood plain), super storms (though living in a mild climate), and really out there stuff like black holes sucking earth into oblivion. Oh, and death.
These were debilitating fears. When thoughts of this or that potential disaster passed through my mind, my body would go cold with terror. Not just an anxiety that causes fretting and unease, but the sort of fear that whitewashes the mind like hi-beams on a dirty windshield and sends waves of frozen fear throughout the body like liquid nitrogen.
For some reason, the most trivial things can trigger this liquid nitrogen whitewash effect. The night I started this poem, I was told by my supervisor as I walked into the on-duty administration office to clock in that he needed to talk to me. As it turns out, he needed to talk to everyone—about the restructuring of everyone’s schedules. But, in that moment, I was frozen in the headlights, and it took me a couple of days to recover from it. This is one of the long-term effects of thoroughly messing up a child’s mind.
