After The Rape Poem by Dónall Dempsey

Her body
like a house
that someone’s
moved out of

and that no one’s
moved into
and so lies
abandoned

even in its perfection
separated from herself
(speaking of herself always
in the 3rd person)
She moves like a ghost
In her mind
from empty room
to empty room

haunting
herself
aware that she is not
present even to herself.

“My self...
what an absurd
use of the word! ”
she thinks
and tries desperately
to find
a self
that no longer
exists.


WRITING – AFTER THE RAPE


A friend of mind had been violently raped(so full of herself hitching home with Christmas presents) and although the physical violence of the act(and it was more than brutal) happened at this particular time...set in stone by the season of goodwill and celebration...the emotional violence of it continued to happen for ever after time and time again in her mind.

She became displaced from her sense of self and could not feel at home in her own body as if she were a hermit crab who had crawled inside an old tin can of Heinz baked beans on the bottom of some ocean.

After that her self was something she had to always suffer…her mind an emptiness that could not be endured and yet had to be endured. She continued to exist and cease to exist as the self she had known. She became a stranger to herself.

This was perhaps the cruelest aspect of the act that she had been robbed of herself...had her self stolen. She couldn’t bear the thought of sex(she who had so loved the act of making love) and her sex life ceased. She hated her body…it angered her with its needs to be touched...to be loved. Her happy marriage broke up and she never had another relationship(of any sort) again. She had cut herself off from life at the root…died to herself and lived on only in her hated body. A death in life. I still mourn the loss of her as if she were dead though she has still to die.