My Answer on Dissociation

Dissociation is an attempt to manage

the experience of being abused.

—The Survivor’s Guide To Sex

Those heads floating away on

the end of a balloon string?

That is it also.  And the

way I fall to looking like

a blank faced stone cat while  you

fluff me like a pillow.  You

wonder at those women found

elegantly crashed into    

treetrunks and cut up beds?  We

thread through this cocked up fabric,

isolated orbs clipping

around you.  Tender full lipped

mines in this glass meadowed land.  paroxysm

(To tell the truth?  I cannot

drive over bridges, my hands,

they steam with my urges

to fly).  It is the droppings

of things…  Lashes.  Heartbeats.

The slippings of butter knives

into sad skin.  The muffled

comings of me to your door

again.  I become two.  One

under you and the flying

of One above us.  Can’t you

feel me watching?  The knocking

of your body rarely gets

answered and you cannot stop.

(Or you just don’t).  It’s the porn

below a bed.  The plunge of

hand through windowpane and cheek.

A slippery wrist with ginger

fingers.  It is the ease with

which I read this from a stage.

“My Answer on Dissociation” first appeared in ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Issue #39.