Dayspring - flipside B - Barbara LM Handley

Dayspring

I want my disassociation back. Okay,
I wasn't completely alive
and no poetry sang through me and I ate
way too fucking many potato chips,
but I was a lot calmer.

Calm like the grave, for sure, calm like
cancer, looking normal, but dying
inside for years before anyone
knew. But there was no pain,
as long as you don't count
the thundering volcano in my chest and
I was so used to that I paid it
no mind.

Now, I breathe and I find that
oxygen hurts and that looking,
really looking, at everything
makes my eyes water and I can't stop
moving. I have never
been so uncomfortable and I wonder
what I did with it, with that
magic ability to leave my body and be -
elsewhere.

I'm not finding the pain to be much
fun, but there are compensations.
I drew little blue hearts
all over my stomach as a
love note to myself and
food tastes pretty damn good and I discovered
sex is a whole lot more satisfying
when I'm actually there for it.
Well, duh!
But I didn't know.

I didn't know
that my body wasn't supposed to be
some kind of south-side motel that
I checked in and out of
when I felt like it.
I didn't know
that when I sang, my voice
was supposed to come out of my pelvis and not die
suffocating in my throat.
Kumbaya, oh lord, kumbaya!
I didn't know.

I was a perpetual out-of-body
experience, but, unlike Shirley MacLaine,
not making any money out of it, and
nothing broke in me, but
nothing grew either. Now,
I'm soft and I cry. Is crying the right word for it
when you're choking on your own snot and
puking on your knees in the shower? I break
every fucking day.

Somehow, afterward,
there's still just one of me. I didn't know
I could suffer like this and I didn't think
I could love this much. I never
wanted to. I never wanted
to love you at all
and I'm not altogether sure, yet,
that I like it. I'm screwed, though,
I can't find a way to stop.
I don't want to stop and that's more
than a little bit scary.

It's hard being out here on the edge
with you and I'm worried that I'll fall, but
from here I can see the sun rise,
watch it crawling up over the
curve of the world and that reminds me
that the horizon is not the end and
I can't fall because the earth turns under my feet
even when I step into darkness.

2005

Thoughts and Comments

I performed this piece at the March Poetry Slam in Eugene.