One afternoon the last week in April*

I sat and watched a flourescent world unfold outside a bus window

it was the world I lived in, yet it was unfamiliar to the shaken husk of a person

piloting my body into my apartment under my sheets

and into another night of anxious torment.

soon the violent poltergeists of trauma pounded mercilessly into my sensibility,

a frail and precious creature just learning to walk,

until it was reduced to Hello’s, Goodbye’s, and How are you’s,

incapable of telling one from the others.

This fatal cycle took hold from that afternoon in the last week in April until a morning in the last week of July

It was then that my sensibility had recovered and I rose a new woman:

naked like the day I was born yet plenty more scarred

ready to return to the flourescent world to which I belonged

 

 

 

*first line from Axe Handles, Gary Snyder