Notes on a Nightmare

Heat and daylight in a place i didn’t know, 

the feel of people pushing past me in a crowd

and ankles tied together 

and when we kept on being killed in strange ways 

I couldn’t feel a thing. I knew it was happening to me though and not to them really, from the trapped suffocated sensation in my chest, 

where I was caged and knotted up eternally in carefully woven ropes of word

but their pain was all imagined – 

shadowy in the corner opposite the window, there with me in the room but at the same time, not. 

The pain that made me wake up, like fire along each finger tip

and the taste of poison in my throat, emanating from torn off legs or arms but never really mine to feel. 

the darkness clinging to cold sweat and my duvet on the floor because now i know to be forever scared of warmth. 

My breath twisting out into the night time, trying to turn it over grey like the smooth face of a pebble with the subconscious work of lungs and heart, whilst the rest of me 

lies paralysed. 

Every essence of myself overwhelmed by the sudden need to reach out frozen,

shaky hands 

that even at rest still tremor, to touch the world like a broken bird, cry aloud and scream 

“I see you!”