Haptophobia

Haphephobia – I forge relationships
Of immense intensity
With people I will never know,
And can never meet,
Who exist only in aether, and
Are given flesh by a libidinous mind. No contact
No contact, no touch,
For I know that I’m compelling
If all I have is the
Page
And my words
To lead the way.

Aphephobia – A monastic cell
Whose door opens into
A brothel where I’m the madam,
An abbess of one and a
Procuress of infinite possibility.

There is a rule of no touching but it counts differently:
Don’t touch my heart and don’t move me,
Don’t caress a strand of sympathy.

Haphophobia – I crafted an environment
Where the closest heartstring
Is full one hour away:

“Oh give me space,” I said,
Meaning the void
Where every distance is essentially infinite,
And light reaches not to my retreat.

Hapnophobia – Love did not (save) me, but it did preserve me.
That is to say, my love, the love
I made,
A preservation of a decaying star,
A nucleus losing everything that gave it identity,
Until it resembles nothing of who it was.

Held in some skeletal form by broken love.

Haptephobia – I recognise symptomology
In my self-description,
Go through my poems with a diagnostic manual
To be convinced of new representations of my flaws,
This and this and these and these.




Haptophobia – For love
Did not (save) me
But
It did preserve me,
In motionless, no, in repetitive cycling motion
Of three-second moments
Done ad infinitum,
The love of flashes of her face
The love of indulgent self-incorporation of the ideas of a person
A gallery of bemused, distant fascination
The contemplation of the universe
Oh cold love, where one thinks to own and never to give!

What preservation this? Aspic! Formaldehyde! Glass! Stone! Ice!

Haptophobia, the fear of touch, that this fragile space
Which is briefly my own
Cannot remain purely my own
And that fear-beyond-fear
That one changes one’s whole life
To avoid one part of it,
To always over-react
Shying from a single touch.

Thixophobia – Love did not (save) me, but it did preserve me.
To keep on ice and thus
Maintain a perfect distance
Ever close, never embracing,
Holding back in cold layers always.

And yet
Longing for the touch,
Of warm hands, of being held in fire and in truest love,
That melts, restores,
To deny self-preservation and find I’m saved.