Disowned, Hidden Parts

I was browsing to see where my hits have been coming from and found Globemix, a blogger written by a Scot from Aberdeen. David Henry has an interesting collection of poems and links - including a link to Soul Food and Peeling the Onion.

He shares a therapeutic-writing exercise he tried.

"The idea is, you write a poem as if it's being written by a hidden or disowned part of yourself. It's literary merit is debatable. It has no neat or coherent form, but that fits the messy and divided place it comes from. I was quite struck when I resurrected it from my notes today. It was like it was indeed 'somebody else' who had written it. I need to do more of this kind of thing.


Poem By Hidden Parts
I am one of his hidden parts.
He hides me because I am 'not nice'.
Not the kind of chap you'd take home
to meet your parents.
I am animal.
I am sexual.
I am raw anger.
Unprocessed, unsanitized by society.
When I see threat
I ready myself
for fight, or flight.
But,
constrained within his frame,
his tightness,
the body systems I influence
fight with those
he needs to control,
so that he's.... well......
under control.
He is frightened of me, and yet
I am at the core of his being.
He sees the downside of me,
never the strength,
the power,
the uncluttered beauty.
When he feels anxious
he cuts himself off.
His mind and his body,
which are really one,
become split.
His readiness to fight become symptoms.
His anger becomes panic.
The more split he is,
the more frightened he becomes.
Descending vortex from a storm-cloud
Never touching ground.

David Henry (2002)"

Why not try this interesting exercise?