emotional dysregulation as an epic or a tragedy or maybe a possession in an unwilling body
(or maybe the process of dissociation)
This tired house.
My god, where do I live?
This is where the little creatures follow the whore through the underbrush,
nittering,
passive
down the alley of poplars on moon nights.
Which is where dead things dance
from twirling clotheslines,
using telephone towers as maypoles,
always making trouble.
The truly dead are never truly quiet
These old hose.
Where do those ladders go?
The whore wears a white apron and a lost hairpin and strums her lyre
impatiently.
aggressive
She knows she’ll lose if she’s not on the beat.
They’re waiting for her, they’re waiting—
now she goes
into the foothills of feet running endlessly.
That’s where the creatures like to go,
where their master is.
Eyes that saw
once. Were they ever mine?
Grief fills the mouth of the whore in the sandstorm, and her pockets,
and jangles
compulsive
the lyrestrings with deep howling.
All of the pretty things lie along the way,
wasting into skeletons and detritus.
That was a ribbon once and that was a dream
long stripped of its pulp,
and the whore collapses.
That lost hand.
Where did I leave it again?
Her lyre tied around her neck, she digs her fingernails into the ground—
forward forward.
neurosis
Wind lashes its whips and she is falling down the stairs.
My god, there is water here,
sweet but too heavy.
One cannot climb wells like ladders.
Fingers sink without purchase; what to do
with a euphoria that suffocates?
euphoria is dopamine
dopamine is
not happiness
dopamine
is not safety
dopamine is
dopamine is
adrenals giving up
the final joy of a drowning
woman
drowning
drowning
woman
epilogue:
Silence enters here
Will my ears no longer drum?
The woman can see the sky best when she is flat on her back all alone in a
well gone dry.
…dissidence
She no longer has to strum her fingers bare:
she’s going nowhere now.
The only way to fight chaos is to fail
to fight. Little creatures fall off at a dead end
where there is nothing left to sustain them.
She does not feel, so they cannot feed.
But yet I breathe?
This weary heart in a jacket of rage.
By Pamela Zimmerman
