She Sees C's: The Mary Quite Contrary Poem
Journaling Kept Me Sane
She Sees C’s
Mary Mary
Cawing voices mocked the cloistered child
As she clumsily clipped her way home
I was thirteen the first time that a boy flung the C word out at me
He cast it across the classroom as though he were clever
I cast my glance across to the educator who closed his eyes and turned away
(Although he called me over later to say we could talk about it in private, wink, wink)
I crossed my gaze back across the claustrophobic room
Cutting the cruel boy down with a cool look
But the way that he carelessly spat the C word slang at my emerging self
Had cut crevices in to my core with vicious claws
Canyons which would remain raw, then calloused, for years to come
When I got home, I cried angry cries, gulping that C word into my core
And the C word became the dominant word in the vocabulary of my self image
Mary Mary
Quite Contrary
She guards herself against cruelty
With the protection of a sullen countenance
And the silence she doesn’t know will hurt her later
Childhood caved into adolescence
And decisions were forced as opportunities crumbled around me
Groups of girls cast C words at my soul in whispered circles
Groups of boys acted as comfort from the cacophony of cruel gossip
But boys will be boys, as they say
And catcalls are not as comforting as they may seem on the surface
The C word is always close at hand
And by the end of my adolescence, I had cocooned myself
Making me the center of an ever-shrinking world
I created courses of obstacles and barriers to be busted only by
The carefully consistent pressure of persistent characters
Contrary, they called me. Closed-off. Cold. Crazy.
I horded new C words to replace the old
Building my self image with a barrage of bricks from strangers.
Letting none come close.
Mary Mary
Quite Contrary
How Does Your Garden Grow?
She moves into adulthood in desperation
Finding that she absolutely has to create a place for herself
Turning men away in favor of spending time with a group of older women
Healers, she considers them, confusing the promise of acceptance with unconditional love
At 19, I claimed my C’s
I grew up decades beyond the blazing burn of bras
But I cloaked myself within a community of women
Considered feminism an escape from loneliness even if I didn’t
Concur with the crowd
I let my C cups become my armor
Let the C word become my mantra
Took back its power because the crone of the crowd guided me to do so
Told me that I could be that C word with conviction
Instead, I was a cuckold
I took the crone at her word until the day I called her and
Got a faraway voice saying she had skipped town with a man
I felt the C word well up inside my throat
And I wanted to cast it out at her
Make her hurt the way she hurt me
But I closed the O of my mouth
Swallowed the C word shamefully
Cut myself off from emotion
Mary Mary
Quite Contrary
How Does Your Garden Grow?
With Silverbells and Cockleshells
She forces herself to form a new community
To take the place in of the community that failed her
Because she knows that she cannot exist entirely alone
She decides that she belongs among the outcasts and the heathens
Creates her home with a group of addicts and artists
At 21, I calmed the singed edges of my burning pain
With cocktails and cigarettes on the back porch of a poetry café
And found within its walls a culture of creativity
Circles of poets came together in close quarters
Causing a convolution of not-so-revolutionary art
To swirl in the cold chill of the air and warm the hearts of the castaways
But I couldn’t call myself a poet
And I couldn’t see myself except in the reflections of poet’s eyes
I met a man there and closely aligned my character with his caress
Coasting along for two years
On the connection of two incompatible souls
Creating a place for one another in the shadows
When he left for the last time, it was in anger
He turned to me and spat the c word across the room
It had become a little c
And I felt nothing
Mary Mary
Quite Contrary
How Does Your Garden Grow?
With Silverbells and Cockleshells
And Pretty Girls All In A Row
The older she gets, the more she realizes
That each year preceding this one was only a child’s year
And as she gets further and further away from her childhood self
She sees that she is no longer forced to be only what the world says she is
She picks and chooses her own self-definitions
Her vocabulary has broadened
At 25, the C word was not a big C
It wasn’t even a little c
It had been supplanted by the sea within my soul
A sea which welled up within me
Swelled and crested and caused a creation of my own concepts
To come together
C’s connected me to my past and could be seen in my future
But the c word was no longer the word I centered myself around
At 25, I could suddenly see that there were 25 other letters in the alphabet
And C ceases to define me
About the Poem
She Sees C's is from a series of poems in which I took the original phrasing from well-known nursery rhymes and added my own language to alter the intended meaning of the poems. All of those poems were about the kids I'd worked with in the social service system except for this one which is a biographical poem.
I had to adapt the formatting of this poem to fit into the HubPages format. In the original, the lines that are in italics without bolding are aligned on the right side of the page. This creates a poetic format in which the original words of the poem grow in bold on the left, the third person vision of the situation is on the right and then the first person experience is back on the right. The third person perspective grows in length through the poem to reflect the growth of more objective perspective gained as I aged.
This poem was a challenge to write in terms of sticking not only with that format but also with the repetitive use of various C words. I did a lot of editing to come up with a final version that I love. I hope you do, too.