Poem: "Emodox"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem came out of the June 3, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by the "unlabeled" square in my 6-2-25 card for the Pride Fest Bingo. It has been sponsored by janetmiles. This poem belongs to the series A Poesy of Obscure Sorrows.


"Emodox"
someone whose mood is perpetually out of synch
with everyone else around them, prone to
feelings of naptime panic, hear-to-heart snark,
or dance club pensiveness


Most people
feel the same things
at the same time.

They are happy
at a party and
sad at a funeral.

They stand on
common ground.

If you're different,
though, if you
dance to the beat
of a different drum,
then they will never
let you forget it.

They will always
remind you that
you are different,
out of step, perhaps
something other and
unlabeled, certainly
not one of the gang.

Every time you cry at
a party because people
are crushing the grass,
or laugh at a funeral
because the deceased
is mooning his boss,

they will remind you
that you are out of step,
admonish you to lie
with your face.

You may wonder
what is wrong with you,
why you are different,
why you never fit in,
why everyone resents you
for not being what they want.

You may not understand it
yourself, you may struggle
to embrace your own identity

until you read a fairytale
and finally realize that
you are not unlabeled,
not out of step at all --

you are just fey.

* * *

Notes:

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, p. 46. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

This comes after "Liberosis."


If you look at fairytales, you will notice that the fey show many traits of neurodiverse people as well as having physical differences. Among the more common examples feeling different emotions than the humans around them, often because their fey nature perceives different things in the event.
 

Comments

[janetmiles]

OOf. I'm not that out of step, but this one hits home.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm glad you found it so moving.

I have often been out of step with other people's feelings. Sometimes it's because I have ulterior resources, other times because I have a different sense of ethics. When I was little, the sense of wrongness was jarring. Eventually I used to being around people who were often A) stupid and B) evil.

One of the more memorable examples was when we watched Return of the Jedi, and the droid torture scene came up. The audience in the movie theater burst into laughter. And I became suddenly, horrifyingly aware of the fact that I was surrounded by monsters who found the torment of another being funny. It's the only time I've seen an audience laugh at a torture scene, and it stuck with me. I always think of that moment when I'm reading about artificial intelligence, or things like the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Robots. It's all too predictable how vicious people can be to those who are different.

Re: Thoughts

[priscilla_king]

If comedy is the art of calling attention to incongruity, what's more incongruous than the idea of a machine feeling pain? (And wouldn't some machines almost deserve it?!)

I can understand how, if the actor doing the machine's voice was doing a good job, people would feel enough empathy for the machine to spoil the effect of the incongruity.

[acelightning2]

My biggest problem in that direction was that I don't find anything people call "comedy" funny. TV sitcoms - a bunch of characters I'd never associate with being verbally cruel to one another. Pratfalls. People falling down. Fart jokes. Those don't make me laugh. What makes me laugh is verbal cleverness and complicated puns. I like limericks. I once had a friend who, whenever he called me on the phone, would start the conversation by reciting a limerick, and I had to reply in kind. Since he was always calling me about his romantic problems, I got a lot of practice making up impromptu verses.

[callibr8]

That's a really cool tradition you had with your friend! Thanks for sharing about that.