Multiplicity

Consciousness convened as a jury.
I brushed my teeth while twelve little jurors blinked back—
iris within iris,
a cubist surveillance.
Startled? You would be too.
A centipede doesn’t question its legs.

Photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash.

They call it dissociation in clinical terms,
a proliferation of the self—
like Delphic flames
or bureaucratic email threads.
But I’ve come to love them,
my tiny, creepy advisors,
each a god that speaks
in riddles of firelight.

Their gospel is strange:
Be better, they say.
Be one, they hum—
with the Source, with the Sun.
Yes, that Sun.

Some of them teach me justice,
not the kind dispensed in courtrooms
or rehearsed in TED Talks by former DAs,
but the kind that stings:
helping thirty strangers a day
carry their sorrow—or their groceries—
or handing out blueberries
in a city that’s forgotten how to pray.

And other days
they start a riot in my chest,
a sexed-up symposium
of Platonic desire gone feral.
I swear, I understood Eros then.
By the Dog! I got what Socrates meant.
They weren’t talking about bodies.
They meant collision—
the kind that rearranges your atoms
and still asks for your number.

Mirror—
you’ve become my mythmaker.
I am both Narcissus and the pool,
and the pool has opinions,
and the opinions wear sunglasses
and host podcasts
about awakening in the surveillance state.

I drafted an email to my therapist:
Subject: I think my inner child has colleagues.
She replied with a billing statement
and a link to the DSM-7.
(I kid. I don’t have a therapist.
I just argue with myself in better lighting,
stealing therapist jokes off the internet.)

But when I quiet down
and listen to the centipede legs tapping,
they sound like Morse code from the soul.

And in those moments,
I believe I am not broken.
I am simply many.
And that might be
exactly
what the Sun ordered.