touch

Touch is about transformation - from the person we think we are to who we really are. I learned to speak truth in clear sentences (not stories) when I experienced being touched safely. Thank you to Marion Rosen, my teacher, and her student, Sara Webb, also my teacher.

I shattered my left shoulder falling off my bicycle last November. It was the hardest thing. It was repaired with a steel plate and 7 screws, my friends for life. At first, for the first week after the surgery, I couldn't touch it, nor associate with it. Since, I've spent lots of time holding onto it with my right hand.

Also, this. One of my favorites: 

"I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone"

The dogs greet me, I descend
into their world of fur and tongues
and then my wife and I embrace
as if we’d just closed the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we’re all saying
each other’s names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.
I’ve come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they’re all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.
Everytime the kids turn their backs
I touch my wife’s breasts
and when she checks the dinner
the unfriendly cat on the dishwasher
wants to rub heads, starts to speak
with his little motor and violin—
everything, everyone is intelligible
in the language of touch,
and we sit down to dinner inarticulate
as blood, all difficulties postponed
because the weather is so good.

---Stephen Dunn