When you stare at the mirror long enough
You go numb
Numb is not
The lukewarm liquid that travels
From your skull down your spine
Switching off a light at each vertebral level
No, that’s disappointment
Do not confuse numb
With the spiny fish bones in your throat
That won’t let your heart talk to your face
That’s denial
Numb will never tell you
To float through the world
Fortified and anonymous
Pain will tell you that.
Numb is not being frozen in the happiest day
Of your life and feeling
Only the kind of happiness you feel everyday
No, that’s contentment
When you’re lying awake at night
Listening for the tightening of bow strings
And the distant war drums of the enemy
Look in the mirror
Right into your own eyes
Your own face
Your own body
Suddenly the ‘own’ disappears
Suddenly it is an exercise in biology
Characterize the creature before you
Genus: Your Species: self
The reflection is no longer you
The eyes that sense it the person that sees it
Isn’t you/
When you’re numb
Neutral is the only gear you run in
Round nose, bushy eyebrows, fat arms, pretty eyes
No, they’re just numbers
Like looking at a circle and seeing
X minus h to the power 2
Plus y minus k to the power 2 equals r squared.
Stupid, jealous, insecure, inadequate
Those are only words
No bow strings no war drums
When you’re numb
This creature
Genus: Your Species: self
Is just another animal on the slab
Pick up your sharpest scalpel
And dissect with impunity
Cut, strip, peel away
Slice open every vein and let the blood flow
Red or Blue or Black
Hunt down every nerve
and follow it to the root/
Touch your warm, beating heart
Dive into the ocean of your unshed tears
Swim in the obscure rivers that feed it
Only Numb will let you breathe under there
Numb will separate you
From this mere mortal
So when you’re forced to go back
Back to being
Genus: Your Species: self
And the bowstrings are taut
And the war drums are no longer distant
You are a warrior
You have seen the color of your blood
The dips and folds of your brain
You have seen the unrelenting doors
You’ve been banging your fists against for years
You know how to keep your hands steady
To smile, as you sharpen the arrow
that will shoot you
And when it pierces your back
You know exactly which screaming nerve
Deafens your brain
You watch them cut along the lines you have already made
You know what you look like
Lying in a pool of your own blood
Red and Blue and Black
And you know
that you are not one of them
You are ten of them
A hundred a thousand
You will survive
Annapoorna Chakrabarty is a 19 year old medical student and a slam poet. She writes mostly about her own experiences and thoughts. In this issue, her submission ‘Numb’ is one of her few poems with a positive theme and comes from a place of weakness that is aware of strength.
