A Knot Around my Heart

I tighten fast inside your tourniquet,
your words a knot around my heart, head exploding with
unweathered and untethered light.

How did you weave a poem so dense
in its changing tempo and major to minor shifts that make me
tighten fast inside your tourniquet?

The alliterative tick of verbs
and the gaping assonance of bouncing beat evokes
unweathered and untethered light

exploding into a refrain
that smothers me – and
I tighten fast inside your tourniquet.

Through the stanzaic bars of this poetic prison
stray optimistic beams of
unweathered and untethered light.

I pick at lines, hoping they will fray,
but instead
I tighten fast inside your tourniquet

craving untethered light.

Kim M. Russell, 11th April 2025

Eleven days in and at NaPoWriMo the daily resource is the online collection of the wonderful Victoria & Albert Museum. I haven’t been for a long time and enjoyed the online visit.

Today’s optional prompt asks us to take a look at Kyle Dargan’s ‘Diaspora: A Narcolepsy Hymn’, a loose villanelle that uses song lyrics as its repeating lines (loose because it doesn’t rhyme). 

Our challenge is, like Dargan, to write a poem that incorporates song lyrics – ideally, incorporating them as opposing phrases or refrains. A tricky one!

I took two lines from the incredibly beautiful ‘Tourniquet’ by Tesseract: “I tighten fast inside your tourniquet” and “unweathered and untethered light”.

16 thoughts on “A Knot Around my Heart”

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