I Am Undone: A Descent Through Unraveling

---

---

Author’s Note

This poem emerged from reflection upon the moments when something—unspoken, unnamed—shatters the center from which we speak and think. It is not always violence that undoes us, but stillness, silence, a breath held too long.

I Am Undone is not a narrative of healing, nor of hope. It is the descent, rendered faithfully: from coherence to fragmentation, from identity to question, from the sentence to the unsaid. It may speak to trauma, or grief, or loss—or any of life’s other vicissitudes—but it seeks no cause. Only witness.

Let it stand as a record of that moment when words fail, and still we reach for them.

---

I Am Undone

by Donald S. Yarab

I. Recognition

It came not with fury, nor with fire.
Not a blow, but a breath withheld.
A stillness uncoiling in the spine.
I did not cry out. I did not fall.
I said only—I am undone.
And the words were true,
though I did not yet know
how much they would mean.

 

II. Unbinding

The star chart curled into ash.
Landmarks dimmed, receded,
folded into fog.
I had names once—
for the road, the self, the longing.
They rusted in my mouth.
I said again, am I—
but the word faltered.
Was I I? Was am still?
Was undone the end, or only
a door swinging inward with no floor?

 

III. Disorientation

I wandered, perhaps.
Or stood still and the world wandered past.
The days no longer linked.
Events occurred—but not to me.
Faces mouthed shapes I could not
hear or remember.
I touched a wall that had always been there.
It crumbled under my hand.
I called it home, or meant to.
Or once had.
I think.

Un—done—I am—undone am I—
I am…am I…?

 

IV. Unmooring

And the past…
no, the shape before the past—
was it mine?
Or borrowed from the eyes of others?
Their eyes are gone.
The mirror does not
answer.
I meant to say a thing—
some thing—
a small
        thing—
but the mouth no longer forms
what the mind no longer sends.

There is no forward.
There is no back.
There is no—

(no is)

 

V. Dissolution

I think I said—I was—
no. I had said.
Once.

Undone.
It was the word. I said it.
Before.
Or after.
I do not—

No shape to the day.
No frame to the thought.
They come—go—
without edge.

The name of the thing
was… not there.
And the word for that—
what was the word?
The word is gone.
The knowing is
not.

I am
        am I
                un—
        not
     not done—
            not I—
      I—was

(was?)

And now—