Nobody in Priscilla's "My Touch" has a name, and no event is described. We hear of "so many people" and "my most important people," and that is all. The poem is not interested in what happened. It is interested in what is left afterwards: a speaker who loves deeply, believes she wrecks what she loves, and has been hurt so often that she can no longer feel anything. Its central idea is that pain does not only hurt, it can switch off the ability to feel. The poem ends in emptiness, not in anger or sorrow.
The title does a lot of work. "Touch" suggests the Midas story, a hand that spoils whatever it reaches. The second line says as much: "ruining everything I meet or touch." The oddest word there is "meet." Touching something can damage it, but merely meeting a person is hardly destructive. The speaker's guilt has become so total that it seems to cover her whole life. That line also begins with a question, "how is it that...", yet it ends with a full stop, not a question mark. She isn't really asking. She sounds like someone who has asked herself this so many times that the question has hardened into a verdict.
Touch is also the sense of feeling, and that is where the title turns bitter. The poem opens with a hand that acts on the world and closes with "I can no longer feel." The power to affect others and the ability to sense anything have both gone. A quiet contradiction sits in the middle, too. In line two she is the one who ruins, and in line three she is the one who is hurt ("I've been hurt by my most important people"). The poem never resolves which she is, and that confusion feels honest. People who blame themselves for everything are often people who have also been badly hurt.
The form tracks this decline. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines sound like speech, almost like confession. The first two lines run to fifteen words each, long and breathless. After that the poem shrinks: eleven words, then the four-word fragment "Over and over again," then a single word, "Now." The repetition is built into the sentence. "So many people" and "so many times" echo each other, and "Over and over again" says the loop out loud. Lines five and six begin with "To the point where" and "Where," so they hang from the line before like steps down a staircase, each leading further from where the poem started. "Now." then stops all of this. It sits alone, a pause that makes the reader brace for what follows.
The imagery is sparse. Only two pictures appear, darkness and tears, and both are stripped of decoration. "Everything is just dark" is flat and almost casual, and the word "just" matters. It sounds less like a dramatic collapse than like a tired report on the weather. The tears are subtler. Crying is normally something that happens to us, but here the speaker says her tears "no longer come when I want them to." She now wants to cry and her body won't allow it. What she mourns is not sadness but its release, and the loss of even the ability to grieve is the poem's cruelest detail.
The last two lines share a pattern, "I can no longer cry. / And I can no longer feel." The "And" makes the second line an escalation. Crying is the outward sign of feeling, and feeling is the source, so the order moves inward, from losing the expression to losing the emotion itself. The poem stops there, with no consolation and no hope offered or promised.
The poem is significant because of its plainness. It uses everyday words like "hurt," "dark" and "numb," with no elaborate metaphors to hide behind, and that bluntness gives it force. It also shows something that is easy to overlook: numbness is not the opposite of pain but one of its after-effects. A reader who has never felt this way learns what it can look like from inside. A reader who has may find their own experience said aloud, in the voice of someone who, at that moment, can't say it any other way.