"Blatant Blister" Analyzing Kim Malinowski's Poem, Inspired by Buffy The Vampire Slayer
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Blant Blister, Analyzing Kim Malinowski’s poem from Buffy’s House of Mirrors
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Remember The Show Buffy, the Vampire Slayer?
If you were watching television during the 1990’s, you may have heard of a T.V. show based on a movie called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you somehow managed to miss it, I’ll summarize it for you. It’s about a high school student named Buffy who is, well, a Vampire Slayer. She is also called The Chosen One because becoming “the slayer” is not a job you audition for or apply to. It’s something for which you are selected, or called to, whether you like it or not.
Buffy is given the task of slaying the vampires before she even gets her drivers license.
she has a watcher in the form of the school librarian. He guides her in learning about her powers. She has friends who find out about her secret mission and helps her battle the forces of darkness.
I loved this show. And I wasn’t alone. It was must watch television for everyone I knew from 8th grade up until I went to college. Now there is a new podcast called The Rewatcher, hosted by Ash Kelley and Alaina Urquhart on Wondery. They discuss what the show means to them, how it has aged since the 90’s, and what it means to them now.
Buffy was an allegory for adulthood.
Although the premise of the show feels far fetched, I think of it now as an allegory for adulthood. Children don’t choose to become adults, and yet they are called to it, and adulthood can feel like a job where the fate of the world rests on your shoulders. You have to deal with scary things that can feel monsterous and otherworldly. Often times teenagers feel like the adults in their lives won’t understand what they are going through, so they often do this work in secret, trying to hide their struggles from those around them.
The t.v. show seemed to “get it.” Instead of making the teens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer look melodramatic, as some adults claim young people are, the characters on Buffy had every right and reason to have intense emotions. Every challenge for them was, literally, a matter of life and death. The show gave us characters we could relate to. A teenager who wanted to avoid her homework, find the right dress for the dance, and navigate the social structures of high school, all while feeling like she alone was responsible for saving the world.
Today I present Kim Malinowski’s poem, “Blatant Blister.”
Kim Malinowski
Blatant Blister (from Buffy’s House of Mirrors)
I want to peel layers
of anxiety like sunburned skin.
Want to burn haunted itch.
Bring me fire.
I’ll dowse myself in kerosine.
No need for demon to teach
me bad dance moves.
My nails dig into my flesh,
no stake to save my heart.
Where do I go from here?
Prescriptions twist me into pretzel, antidote vampire bite.
I dare to grip Buffy’s flame.
Let it freeze me into solid ache.
Unresolved tension when
love
doesn’t matter and want
makes us flame.
The task of poetry is to express a feeling completely.
In workshops I often see writers try to write about a feeling, but then back away from it. They say “I feel this sometimes, but I know I’m being melodramatic,” or “I feel this sometimes but not always.”
But one of the tasks of poetry is to help us express a feeling completely, without backing away from it, without reasoning our way out of them, or overanalyzing them, or dampening them down with qualifications, . What I love about this poem is that it takes a feeling and amplifies it to the nth degree.
Another job of poetry, to quote Shakespeare, is to “give to Airy Nothings a local home and a dwelling place.” (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, scene i. Oberon). This poem takes the emotion, which has no form, and ties that emotion to the physicality of the speaker’s own body. This is appropriate because sometimes feelings are so intense it seems like they take over your entire body. Which is why the speaker says
I want to peel layers
of anxiety like sunburned skin.
Want to burn haunted itch.
The speaker of this poem wrestles with what a lot of us wrestle with, especially in the teenage years, the feeling that our emotions might be too much for us. We often feel we want to escape them, and escape ourselves for that matter. Part of what made Buffy unique as a t.v. show was that the main hero admitted to her vulnerability, her frustration with herself, her doubts. Sometimes her self-recrimination. This is part of what made her so relatable.
In trying to take on the world, Buffy recognizes her own capacity for destruction, including self-destruction. She puts herself in dangerous situations where she could get bitten by a vampire, or turned into a deamon. Because she is the chosen one, she doesn’t have an easy way out, like succumbing to the bite of a vampire, or getting staked through the heart. Instead, her task is to endure the power and the responsibility of beinng the slayer and continuing to do battle.
Fire is the perfect metaphor to use.
Fire is such an appropriate metaphor for this situation. The thing about a flame is that it is both dangerous and also helpful. It destroys what it feeds on, but it also provides light and heat for those who see it. It can be both destrutive and creative, fearful and necessary.
When the speaker says she grips Buffy’s flame I interpret that as meaning the speaker is accepting the difficulty and intensity of her feelings without running away from them. Like Buffy she is choosing to express herself fully, even though the intensity may use her for kindling. She is both the protector of others, and also the thing that may need to be sacrificed in order to keep the fire going.
The final line makes me think of the television show, how we all watched it, taking comfort from the difficulty of these strangers and watching them battle their own deamons. Everything was exagerated, yet it felt relatable. Gripping Buffy’s flame gave a lot of us the feeling that if a high school girl could battle the monsters from the hellmouth, then maybe we too could battle the more mundane deamons, and over the top feelings of our own. Maybe we too could become brave enough to endure the heat of that ongoing, ever-burning flame.
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