Six short lines, and nearly every one removes something solid. The air goes first, thickened into fog. Then the speaker's presence goes ("You are not here"), then reality itself ("you are not real"), and finally the body, which turns into paper. By the end, all that is left is an argument about whether any of it is happening. Under its title, "Trigger Warning: Dissociation," lakewriting's poem is a compact portrait of detachment, the sense of being cut off from yourself or the world around you.
The title itself is worth pausing on. A trigger warning is a courtesy, the kind of content note readers often meet online, and it names the experience in clinical language before a single image appears. The poem then does the opposite of explaining. It never defines dissociation but puts the reader inside it. The title gives the diagnosis, and the six lines give the symptom.
Take the first image: "Fog clots the air." Fog usually drifts, rolls or settles. "Clots" is a word from blood and wounds, from things that thicken and stop flowing. The verb makes the atmosphere heavy and faintly sick, as though the air were injured. It also suggests a mind in which thought and perception have slowed and blurred. The line is very short and ends abruptly, so the poem starts almost without breath.
Next comes the pronoun. The poem never says "I." Everything is "you," and that second person pushes the self away from itself. It could be the mind addressing itself, or one part of the speaker watching the rest from outside; the poem doesn't say, and the uncertainty is part of the effect. The central claim is also a paradox: "You are not here and you are not real." Someone has to be present to be told they are absent. The repeated "you are not… you are not" has a flat, insistent rhythm, like a phrase said so often it stops meaning anything.
The third line is the only one that names emotion directly, and it is one of the longest: "Full of anxiety, full of despair." The doubled "full of" makes the line bulge. It also sets up a tension with the line before it. The self is declared empty and unreal, yet it is crammed with feeling. Dissociation here is not simple numbness. It is feeling pressed against a self that cannot be located.
Sound holds the poem together in a loose, uneasy way. "Air," "despair" and "swear" rhyme at the ends of lines one, three and five, returning like a pulse. The lines between them ("real," "paper") don't join in, and the last line, ending on "dreaming," breaks the pattern altogether. The line lengths also swell and shrink, from the four syllables of "Fog clots the air" to the roughly ten of line three and back to short lines. The poem is not smooth, and the last line stops without a full stop, as if the experience simply continues.
The pivot is "You are made of paper." Paper is flat, thin and easily torn or burned. It is also something we write on. Judging by the imagery, the speaker feels two-dimensional and fragile, like a cut-out figure. One could also read the line as self-aware: the "you" in a poem really is made of paper, a figure built from words.
The ending turns on a double meaning. To "curse and swear" is to rage, but "swear that" also means to insist, almost as an oath. The speaker does both at once. The word "So" suggests that the anger follows from being paper, though paper that can curse has obviously not lost all feeling. Insisting "that you are dreaming" can be read as a hopeful bargain, since dreams end and you wake up. It can also be read as one more symptom, the mind refusing to accept that this is real. The poem leaves both readings open.
That openness is what makes it worth reading closely. In six lines it gives shape to a state that people often find hard to describe, and its form carries the experience: the clipped lines, the slipping pronoun, the rhyme that fails to resolve. A reader who knows this feeling may recognise it, and one who doesn't gets a short, unsettling way in.