Shadow People: Debbie’s Poem
Consuela Caldwell / Julia Hatch

Shadow people control me
with a Pavlovian presence,
pulling my strings,
manipulating my desires.

I live with muffled screams of girls.
My screams their screams,
holding our arms up in the air
for the thrill of falling and falling,
down slopes of roller coasters,
fearing more
the boredom of leveling off
into straight lines of normality.

What little girl needs dolls
when she has shadow people;
prematurely triggering desire,
washing childhood away in a flood of
forbidden pleasures.

I tell you this with measured words,
selected for their darkened lenses,
filtering out the harshest of light from
an out-of-control sun, shielding
you from what I am.
A girl with barbwire boundaries,
woven into neural networks,
defining who I am
inside of a cage.

I know my place,
they know me for utility,
a passive acceptance of
a hammer
a saw,
a kitchen utensil.

Shadow people have drives
Proclivities,
stripped of conscience,
for barn yard occupants
in stalls,
waiting for attention
and some semblance of love.

They are a drug I’m addicted too
with my adrenaline-driven passivity,
with its train wreck made inevitable,
by switches on tracks
they control.

What is this place?
It gives me a chill.
Who are these people?
I shake uncontrollably.
What do they want with me?
I have no idea, I have no
control and I
love it.

Earthquakes
rob me of all stability.
I feel my body falling, as my
stomach turns upside down;
spilling out the contents of my life,
that stains blood red
on every written page.

But shadow people hide
in plain sight.
They live among us
feeding off innocence. They’re
indistinguishable from
respectable people,
who pretend not to see them.