The nightmares roosted in my chest but did not leave
when the morning light bled in, when the days turned.
My desperate mother cannot massage the blood back
into my extremities, cannot kindle a spark within my eyes.
Kill switch my brain silently. There is no post traumatic.
This wire is live, an exposed nerve. Let me dig it out,
bare down on the electrocution. I seize, my jaw clenched,
scratching off invisible hands, severing reality into a memory.
I can talk about it until that one point. Then I’m left incoherent.
Then there’s no point in poetry. Nothing could describe it,
that feeling, the unadulterated horror that never pales,
never becomes tolerable. I regurgitate the same terror
but I can never digest it, it just burns through me, images
corroding, impossible to rationalize, impossible to live with.