Ego-Dystonic
by Madelaine Caritas Longman
And from all that compulsive versifying—to write poems is irresistible to those who engage in the practice, believe me. . .
Anita Lahey
At a reading, someone asks about inspiration
and I say it’s more like a rhythm, or a pulse.
I don’t say: there are things stronger than thought
and I’ve touched them: that something breaks in
to my sleep like a rhythm, hotwires my pulse
to half-hazard, half-dove, my chest crammed
with bonecall. I touched something broken
and it was the closest that I came to god. It came,
haphazard, dove into my chest and crammed
a thicker dark into each chamber. I used to call it prayer.
I called it god and closeness. I called and it came
and I left, or tried to, aspired to donate my body
to metaphysics, to thicken the dark into prayer
and not thought. Now I want to write differently.
What happens if I try to stop leaving my body?
The diastole: I am. The systole: I’m sorry.
How to write the difference, continue past not-thought
as the chamber fills with blood? To find what is left
to say after I’m sorry, after I am, even after now what? To live
a heart must squeeze itself empty. When it relaxes,
a chamber fills with blood. A teacher says I should
write towards the light, but even light is a kind of burning.
Does to relax always mean to relinquish, to empty
the chamber? Jabés describes god as a metaphor for nothing;
when I think of either, I see light and burning. If entropy
is law, is movement towards chaos not a kind of order?
Bloodless, unchambered, no thing to be metaphor.
The world becomes stillness, disperses. I can’t answer
which movements are mine, which disorder’s.
An incomplete cleanness circles my fingers.
The world becomes. Stillness disperses. I reach
for prayer or pen, a dream riddled open,
the same incompleteness that fingers a scab.
Repeat to myself inspiration is breathing. Reading
from rede, to interpret; as in riddle or dream.
I reach to touch something stronger than thought.
Madelaine Caritas Longman is the author of The Danger Model (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019), which received the Quebec Writers' Federation Concordia University First Book Prize. In 2025, the Canada Council awarded her the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature. Her poetry appears in Room, PRISM international, Vallum, The Ex-Puritan, and elsewhere. She lives in Halifax and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Dalhousie University.