This poem is very personally and emotionally significant to me. I can’t know whether my present dissociative numbness is well captured and expressed in this poem.

I only know that I do need to believe someone might hear what I cannot say straightforwardly.

And it is this worry — the worry that we have not achieved connection, that we may suffer the fate of being perpetually unnoticed in our most authentic (hence vulnerable) expressions - that gives form to what is meant, I think, by the ‘torture’ of a tortured artist.

It’s knowing that I can never know whether I have been seen, been heard by other human beings . . . that I am ‘real’ in my oppressively self-constructed isolation.

Embodied Darkness

by Z Shihab (ameriwire)

abandoned, alone, without his wedding ring, he advanced every positive adventure.
his heavy heart trying the reality on— the reality
that passed,
presents
the unmistakeable scent
of trauma without trembling, of painful illusions,
of the very suffering of love
in this, instincts vanish,
altered by the quiet replaced by a consciousness in which

something
has gone
terribly wrong.

this unbearable stare visits tonight
from the depths of thought
thesteel memory,
an infinite consciousness, a radiant manuscript written by Nobody at all
is
the captive storyteller
to his own captive mind

• Embodied Darkness(person) by ameriwire
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• A Nice Quiet War(fiction) by lostcauser
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• dreaming of anywhere but here(thing) by pleurisy
• Spineless and Cold-Blooded Creatures(fiction) by lostcauser
• Finding words(poetry) by losthuskie
• Live in Fear(personal) by brick killed u
• the smoke of our burned books rises into the sky(poetry) by etouffee
• slow dancing with myself(poetry) by ame_9001