Revisiting Moon Project and consequent ruminations on the anatomy of Trauma and Memory – riffing out from a moment in earth-time that occurred this morning.

The Unseen Corners of My Eyes

Today there has been a leak
From several selves ago
For no particular reason –
Something to do with how the light fell on my hand as it wiped the sink this morning
(My dog would bark at tall men wearing hats)
And I am face-planted, BAM, into memory carnage;
Quicksand primordial
And fathomless deep.

From as early as I can remember,
My strategy for avoiding Crushing Disappointment has been
To be somewhere else
Doing something else
Every time.
Somewhere (anywhere)
Doing something (anything)
Immediately.
Ideally, at the speed of light:

If I am somewhere else,
maybe it didn’t really happen;
I was never really there –
Or maybe I am someone else entirely,
And it never really happened to me at all.

Mostly this has been Highly Effective:
I have developed prey-species alertness to changes of tone and temperature,
An earnest regimen of self care,
Even a kind of Vertical Lift Off Device,
That, well handled, means pain can mainline through me and I barely feel a thing.
A kind of going limp, whilst the spirit departs;
A disappearance and total surrender.
Then, you can, you know, do what you like to me.
I am elsewhere –
Awaiting, quietly, a climate less hostile.

But sometimes it leaks back in:
Trickles down across the zigzagging fault-line of lifetimes
Siphons in sideways via the unseen corners of my eyes.
Pools in the root behind my head,
Threads down my vertebrae
Infuses, cold and alien, into my networks,
Prises apart my chest cavity,
Rips open the holes in my face,
And vivisects me, gut-first, into the the full, brutal experience of it.

Today there has been just such a leak
Utterly unexpected.
From several selves ago.
For no particular reason –
Something to do with how the light fell on my hand as it wiped the sink this morning
Some reptilian synaptic causeway reaching its certain conclusion –
(My dog would bark at tall men wearing hats)
And the foundations of my non-evidence-based-practise of Hope,
Are handfuls of dust upon shifting sands.