Draft 1: 02/16/2025
“This year blossoming
A-Bomb
Dropping aplomb
Plum-plum-plum
A hum-hum-hum-hum
And we’re done.
Kicked teeth, once mine
I lie
floorside
and planar
A Lying smile
In a room with a view
Of the teeth, once new
For sale
Never used
Dreams?
Rearing foil reflections
On floor, mine
carpet bombs
yesteryear’s Napalm
A fortnight still
not with song
NOr sonic boom
Sing
Shackleton
He was presumptuous.
Sing muse
“Sing yourself” (female voice)
Difficulties are just things to overcome after all.
Ship and stores have gone—so now we’ll go home.
I am so tired.”
Draft 4: 03/06/2025
Notes: This is a deeply personal expression of a feeling I’ve had for some time. My entire life, really. An internal struggle with lifelong depression and hair raising sense of impending doom. Perhaps this is why I’m drawn to travel, to experience the world outside the embodied familiar. For a dopamine rush and a reminder of the worlds unwavering generosity. A reminder that whatever storm clouds the mind, the world carries on. I find beauty in my own meaningless. If that makes sense. Like I can let go of feeling like I have to matter and just live. Without feeling the weight of contributing to some ideological narrative or systematized rhetoric. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, When you put the glasses on – you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.
Recognizing yourself as a free agent you remove the glasses, and begin the more difficult work of liberating the self from the tethers of patriarchy, the assumptions, and preconditioning of your surrounding… but I digress. 🫣 To tell you the truth, I’m just a big nerd for this stuff. Ok!
In Draft 4 I removed the raw energy of loose truncated verbs and hanging nouns and layered them with sharper imagery and a pinch of rhythm. I also expanded on the interplay between sound, space, and exhaustion. This is meant to reinforce themes of resilience and resignation.
Draft 4
Fortitudine Vincimus
This year blossoms—
an A-bomb blooming,
aplombless, plum-plum-plum,
a hum-hum-hum-hum—
then silence.
Teeth, once mine,
scattered like pearls on the floor.
I lie planar, grin fixed,
a cracked relic
in a room with a view—
the teeth, once new,
for sale, never used.
Dreams?
Their foil reflections shimmer,
warped,
spilled across the floor.
Carpet-bombed yesteryears,
napalmed hopes,
a fortnight still
without song,
without sonic boom.
Sing, Shackleton,
but was it not presumptuous?
The muse does not answer.
“Sing yourself,” she says.
Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.
The ship and stores have gone—
so now, we go home.
I am so tired.
What do you think of the lyrics? The poem so far?
Questions? Comments? Concerns? I’d love your feedback.
Now, how about we dine deeper.
Personal Essay: A Blizzard, Shackleton, and the Weight of Survival
“Fortitudine Vincimus”—“By Endurance, We Conquer.” This was Ernest Shackleton’s motto as he led his crew through the wreckage of the Endurance, stranded in Antarctica, surrounded by ice, with no choice but to push forward. But endurance has a cost. Egomania or no, Shackleton holds a tight grip on our mythology of endurance.
This poem is a meditation on that cost. Set against the quiet violence of a Kansas City blizzard, the speaker grapples with exhaustion—sure physical, but deeply existential. The opening lines invoke an explosion disguised as growth—“this year blossoms”—but the growth is an atomic bomb, a paradox of destruction and expansion. The repetition of “plum-plum-plum” and “hum-hum-hum” evokes a rhythmic inevitability, a ticking bomb that lands without fanfare.
The image of scattered teeth—once whole, now discarded—represents a personal loss. Whether the teeth belong to the speaker or to someone else is irrelevant; they are remnants of something that once had potential, now commodified—“for sale, never used.” The teeth echo both childhood and violence, something lost too early, something taken.
The second half of the poem wrestles with futility. The speaker is searching for meaning, but even music, even history, fails to comfort. Shackleton, the great survivor, is questioned—was his survival truly triumphant, or was it just another form of suffering? The muse refuses to sing. The voice instead turns inward: “Sing yourself.” Survival is personal. No one will do it for you. *Here I contradict deeply myself. I’m a drunken Bacchae dancing in love of the muse!
The closing lines bring in Shackleton’s own words: “The ship and stores have gone—so now we’ll go home.” But where is home when everything has been stripped away? Is it forward or backward? Or is it simply stopping? The poem ends with a whisper of surrender—I am so tired—leaving the reader to wonder: is endurance truly a victory, or just another burden to carry?
This poem is about resilience in exhaustion, about questioning the narratives we tell ourselves to keep moving forward. In the white void of a blizzard, when the world is reduced to silence and survival, the question lingers: is it enough?
And now a call to action: I dare you to question your identity. I dare you to ask yourself, “how have I, who have I, and what have I accepted as “true” in becoming myself? What are my figured worlds, as we call them; those pesky
I’ll leave you with another question: what will you do to THINK, QUESTION, POLITICIZE, LEARN, HONOR, TEACH, the true causes of poverty? Of our aching cultural guilt? Before you act, learn. Understand.
I love you cats. Thank you for being a part of this life and sharing your time with this person called Nicholas.
-Bumi
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