PTSD in the Morning

Getting in the shower is the hardest part

(too many voices to steer around in the hall)

even when a baptism is just what I need.

 

My daughter’s unwashed hair haunts me

like a rattling voodoo chain of shell and bone

where curses fall and scurry, wanton, across the floor.

 

I must go somewhere else -- somewhere sacred --

to burn a book of poetry:

an empty place in the woods; a parking stall beside the sea;

at a cross by the road with plastic flowers;

in the dark beside you.

 

So much noise and wretched light is coming from inside,

which makes the outside deafening.

 

I dreamt of a house with leaking faucets

and orange creeping up the walls,

rooms filled with new furniture like a department store showroom

but too jammed for anyone to sit--

I have to climb over them.

 

People with broken, yellowed teeth deliver anointed sermons

and I fall inside the words.

Smoke and cats hide behind blood-red walls and curtains.

A caricatured, juicy centipede

crawls, too fast, across the gold stamped paper

and I squish it with an old crusty flat,

as if that does that trick.

 

The phone rings as I run through wet sand to get to you

but all I hear on the other end is static.

 

Reviews

[G. Cedillo]

This is glorious. Rushed and frenzied, each line carries a vital energy, but also disassociating and slightly surreal.

Your stanzas and breaks are well articulated, each one a little vignette moving the theatre along. Great word choices - - "baptism," "rattling voodoo chain," deliver anointed sermons" - - to name a few. Nothing too carried away, though I could see how that might easily happen with a piece like this. It is, after everything, kind of restrained in its madness.

Where has the poem gone, after all? We don't notice the real-ishnes slip away until well after the 5th stanza, and now we're completely elsewhere. It's hypnotizing. Which is why that last line is so effective. Its startling. It brings us back. You teach us how to read your own poem. Its good drama.

Thank you!

[Kristina Moulaison]

Nice to see you! Thank you so much for your thoughtful words.

[KCthelastboyscout]

Quite an emotional rollercoaster you take us ( the reader) on.descriptively brilliant to read.your mind is screaming and you're writing down the words

[Kristina Moulaison]

Thanks! I appreciate you reading.

[Emily B]

god, I know this, and you wrote it brilliantly

[Kristina Moulaison]

Thanks Emily!

[jacob erin-cilberto]

i was especially taken by the third stanza---such a powerful piece of work here.
those demons that just won't let go...the "you" in the last stanza reads to me as sanity...just that close...it calls us, but when we answer...there is only the static of insanity on the other end...
all those voices..all those hallways.
j.

[Kristina Moulaison]

Oh, I love that interpretation, Jacob...thank you!

[wordman]

lol,i loved the write,but i have that stuff all day

[Kristina Moulaison]

Thanks! Yeah, "PTSD all day" just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

[wordman]

you made it sound much better,lol