Clean: An Anthology

Split Soul (Slam Poem)

John is a voice inside my head.

I once asked him what his full name is. He told me to call him John Doe. My therapist said that his name might represent my fears of anonymity, of being discarded and dismembered on the side of the road so far away from my real self that I am dubbed just one of the many Jane Roes, another footnote on a canary yellow legal pad. John would agree- he wants me dead, forgotten, and unclaimed.

He has a habit of whispering statistics in my ear as me and my friend walk alone at night- one in three, forty-six percent, zero out of zero chances of escaping it. Oftentimes, when I am reading articles tagged sex, crime, assault, violence, murder, power, he takes over me. I know that it is him because when the real me, Emma, reads things like that, she clicks Retweet with lots of praise and smiley faces. John, on the other hand, grabs me and pulls me on to the bed, forces me into a fetal position under a throw blanket and quickens my breathing to give him oxygen and life that I, happy and untouched , could never provide.

Every morning, he stands in the corner of my room and watches me get ready. Give me a show, just a flash, it's not like you're worth anything else. When I dab a milliliter of perfume on my wrists, it's how could you expect anyone to resist that? You're just asking for it...

I tell him to shut up. He doesn't listen and continues looking me up and down, smirking, calculating if my jeans are too tight and my red lipstick gives off the wrong kind of impression to guys like me, baby. Might want to tone it down. The more I try to fight him off, the more abrasive he becomes. He switches to epithets and words that I usually only see in the comments section of feminist articles. My bare feet touch cold tile in a kitchen, somewhere far away, I have traveled back in time seventy, eighty years, I am a split soul, fighting a battle for my own humanity and I think I might be losing.

A/N: I might upload an audio track of me doing this as a slam later on. What do you guys think? I can't believe this poetry book is kind of taking off.