Twilight’s Stillness

 

       How many nights has the radio

       next to your pillow droned

       a drunkard's lullaby

       loud enough to wake the dead.....

       Tonight I beg for quiet, 

       but clouded eyes scowl angrily at me.

       After calling out some menacing retort,

       you soon return to drunken dreams.

       Sober briefly,

       during day's first waking moments.

       You finally rise up,

       fortified by countless doubles.

       

       You'll be gone soon,

       til who knows when.

       Relieved when you finally depart,

       I remove traces of your essence.

       Sweet twilight's stillness,

       transforms my dismal surroundings,

       into finer illusions where,

       only small bits of life's reality remains.

       I become the silent watcher
       filled with euphoric radiance.
       My soul dances

       with an ecstasy for living.

    

       This sanctuary of separation,

       contains my sanity secret.

       Only in this stillness is

       there a brighter self.

       Be still, I whisper,

       God is with you.

       Be still, I whisper,

       you are never alone.

The protagonist of this poem is using dissociation as a defense mechanism.  At the non-pathological end of the continuum, dissociation may include common events such as daydreaming. During ongoing traumatic experiences like the stress of dealing with a chronic alcoholic, the dissociation serves as a defense to help a person tolerate what might otherwise be too difficult to bear. In extreme situations, a person may dissociate the memory of a place, or feelings about events, mentally escaping from shame, fear, and pain.