Foreign Hatred

Foreign fingers find my skin,
I withdraw.
Your touch, yours again
But those hands
Weren’t yours a moment ago.

Maniacal laughter resounds
Throughout my temporal lobe.
“wow”
laughs, laughs
As though my protesting
– a joke –
No- the punch line.
But laughter has been silent for months,
Molecules in the air still
Memory cells refuse to die.

Flashes, putrid images
In my sleep, in a blink,
That face tattooed on the inside of my eyelids,
Branded on my cornea.
Providing a synapse –an impulse—a desire for
Any sharp object
To carve
Him
Out.

1/10 of a second of a feeling,
A visual, an echo equates
Hours of distance, of nothings,
Of an intense wave of hatred
That shifts, from that hand,
From that laugh, from that face,
To myself.

Not because I deserve it.
Not because he doesn’t,
But because against myself
I am not helpless, pinned down,
And losing.

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