IGNORANCE (seventh grade)
It is dark.
I am hurting.
Someone is cutting a deep
Bleeding gash into my soul.
I ignore it.
I am crying.
The gash is infected.
It hurts.
I ignore it.
I am alone.
My past is creeping back.
It slices my wound open again.
I am bleeding.
I ignore it.
I am sinking.
Sinking into a black hole.
My heart is raw.
It is dying.
I ignore it.
Nine years later.
I am dying.
I am drowning.
It is still there.
I ignore it.
I can hardly breathe.
The sun is gone.
The world is black. I hurt.
I need help.
I am no longer alone.
Someone holds my hand.
They warm my frozen soul.
“Here,” they say, “let me fix that.”
They put on a band-aid.
But I have healed.
A whining voice comes.
It pleads with me to hurt again.
I ignore it.
How fragile the skin of a china doll
who shatters with the breath of the wind.
I can spill forever into the cherry lips
of the messy convergence of innocence.
with his hands shaped from plywood excess.
The dark angels burst through the door
ten seconds too late to save the life
of Eternity’s daughter.
CONFRONTING PASSION (ninth grade)
You laid me on the floor
and used me as a matress for your lust.
Blood meant nothing when it painted
our connection.
Tears were useless
when you fed on my fear.
For years you lived with hard eyes,
not caring about some broken bed-springs.
Your sweat tattooed guilt into me.
Your spit drowned me in its apathy.
Confronting you...
never.
I'm healing now.
Good bye.
I hope you never break another little girl.
I hope you hate yourself for what you've done.
(This poem is about confronting my cousin... ironic that it was written last year, and now I am faced with its reality)
YOUR HANDS (ninth grade)
You will forgive me
for not trusting fingers nor lips
when it was a nightmare
of hands and spit
that took the moon
on an August day
and carefully on rifts of frailty
cracked it shamelessly
in half.
MAKEUP (9th grade)
I stand
quietly beside myself
in the doorway,
smearing yellow lipstick
in my eyes.
You wonder
where I've gone.
Your pupils look right through me
at the future
that blares brightly
in my hair.
"It was only an affair
of the innocent,"
you tell yourself
as you try to move on.
But every time you start to forget
you see a yellow face
lingering in the doorway.
Sex is a lipstick
you can never wash off.
TAR (9th)
He blows glass on the seashore,
makes something beautiful out of the sand
that cuts into my feet like a million
grains of blush.
He'd never tell you
that he once made something ugly
out of the glass
of innocent childhood.
He'd never tell you that one day
he left the blowtorch on too long,
let the flames lingering lick,
and what should have remained unbroken
melted into the shallow pools
of his anger.
You'll smile at him and walk on
with the children on your arms.
You'd never guess that on a day
when the sun was hotter than the grass
he left me hollow,
black inside.
(This is a metaphor... blowing glass is a blow job... the person blowing glass is my brother... it's about how charming he is to everyone, but I know what he did to me).
CONVENTION OF THE ABUSED (ninth)
Ten thousand hungry eyes
make young faces
look one million years older.
This is what happens when pain
skips a beat.
We will sit in rapt attention
and wait for the photographers
to carve into us
the explanations of our pain.
Outcasted into Greenpeace
we are planted again as seeds.
We are older than we should be,
we are sadder than we look.
We are the generation
that caught the raindrops
of your confused abuse
and sucked them in like oxygen.
We never knew
there was anything else in life,
and you laughed
because at ten million years old,
we were still innocent,
still young.
WE ARE THE ABUSED (10th)
The fact that you ignore us
doesn't change the fact that we exist,
quietly, in the corners,
black widows despised and forced into the edges
of cold garages.
We are another page in your psychology textbook
complete with a collage of glossy pictures,
mostly children with big brown eyes
who have probably never cried at night
or hated the texture of the human palm or lip.
You can eat your hamburgers
and look great in your miniskirts
and make out with your boyfriends
at the football games with floodlights
dimmed down low
and the stars shining
like the tears you'll never cry,
but still we sit dry-eyed
home alone in the basement,
and cringe at the touch
of a stranger.
What is socially unacceptable
is normal to us,
the suffocating caress of a father,
a brother, a mother, a cousin,
in the places you let no one explore.
Incest is another definition on your
vocabulary test-
to us it is oxygen we hate but require.
We represent all you despise:
that for all you do right,
for all the compassion of your childhood,
somewhere in a dark house
evil still exists: pure, incarnate,
undeniable.
We are the abused and we will no longer be ignored,
no longer be detested,
no longer be untouchable.
We are more human
than you'll ever be.
LEARNED SEXUALITY (10th)
1. I learned my sexuality
on the floor with you,
and the hard erection
of your desire
was the word for a
hatred of sex hormones and pain.
I learned my sexuality before
even there was the word:
sex.
Something salty I could
cup like a globe in my hands,
shame and guilt.
I felt so dirty I washed and washed
my hands but there was no
baptism from the sweat your body
left on mine.
Because you were my hero and my brother
all things carnal twisted into my emotions
until I could no longer separate the two,
or separated them too much,
and the softness of carpet or gray sky
made me sad.
**
2. My friends learned their sexuality
out of the books their mothers gave them
with organic pictures of naked bodies.
The drawings didn't
turn them on like they did me,
a fire deep within me I've grown to hate.
They dream about sex and
I dream about rape
and taut muscles and firm lines
and (all-consuming) the guilt.
I am left distinctly
with the knowledge that you broke me
in some way
because I am not like my friends,
lusting after the carnal.
I am torn in the emotions,
apathetically recounting the details
that for them mean a new degree
of glory and to me mean
a deeper depth to hell.
You taught me my sexuality
and now there is no fixing the lies
your body spoke long ago.
DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY (10th)
The San Francisco bridge
(no visible from this
perspective on the floor
but far off in the distance)
doesn't taste of salt but of
metal, corrosive and as bright
as the red of a siren
in the morning when I should be asleep
but instead am tasting sald,
sodium chloride.
We drove across it
(you held me down with
shaking hands the color of
frostbite in early May)
as ants crawling cautiously on
(it's a game)
a blade of grass.
It is the way the sky and the sea
connect in a thin blade of fission
that allows me to split myself
now into the bridge and
the taste (like a lollypop, you say,
just like it).
In the movies men swing
like spiders off the threaded suspension,
to escape the dirt
(I'm crying, gagging, held down), men are,
by the bridge, liberated from conformity.
Red was our mother's favorite color
(you tell Mom and I will kill you),
splashes of the stuff that
makes the bridge and human orifice
unkosher, life-blood, like meat,
not salted or dried
(I will hate this taste forever,
this taste of salt and our mother's
ignorance).
It is two lives in one moment, one real-
a bridge, the sky, the sea-
and one of horror only containable
by mechanics of grammer (the taste, the tears,
the oxygen starvation,
and your words-
a game, I'll kill you if
you tell.)
INSTANT OF COMBUSTION (10th)
I took so many pills to make it go away
to let your tongue dissolve the pain
to let your hands massage the ache
to let the crime scene not be drawn
in chalk on a living room floor.
If a body could be punctured
it would be mine and my life bleeding out
if a boy could be broken
it would be an alleyway of tears.
If a life could be saved with one instant
it would have been ours and us naked
in Oakland in September
the second you touched me
the second I cried
the second I cracked in two.
It was my fault, you said.
It was my fault, I knew.
I took so many pills
to never forget that day.
I WANT TO PROTECT YOU (11th)
It's too hot for June
and you mean too much to me
to be sitting there now.
I want this angry lake of ink from my pen
to never touch you.
I am your definition of rape,
a huddled mass of tension
as they talk about
penetration and the need to feel clean.
You can still smile at this.
I want you to be this clean at fifty,
your mother never having to wash your mouth with soap.
I think that if you die without being kissed
or crushed with the pain of that word
R A P E
then there is still hope in the world.
You laugh right now
as my pen digs into paper.
I want so badly to protect you from life.
REGRETS (11th)
How do we take
the remnants of our childhood-
our past together-
and arrange them into something
we don't have to be ashamed of?
I want to take the awkwardness
out of the days
you pressed your hands
your lips your tongue
to all the parts of us I've grown to hate.
Are the echos of bruises
from Mom's angry hands
enough to justify what you did?
I want to hear those words-
molestation, rape-
and quench the nausea that sweeps through me
every time I hear them.
Is that enough?
How can we live with the guilt of him,
remembering the way his body entered mine
in a halo of blood,
and the knowledge that he never changed,
and he has kids now?
How can we live with ourselves
knowing he's out there
doing to them what he did to me?
Are all these years-
the meth, the crack,
Mom's hits, my razors-
enough to nullify what we've done?
I should be mad, they say,
I should hate you.
But what is strong enough
to allow us
to look back on our lives
and see anything but pain?
ART (11th)
You must be
past perfect skin
and teeth and smile
made of webs of broken glass
and shots of dated morphine.
I keep remembering
your hands inside me
stretching me open
like the door to the cistine chapel,
somewhere to pain
with your misguided childhood,
somewhere to depict
what you see in your mind...
Naked angels, all in pastel colors,
me, bare as a peach without fuzz
on that living room floor.
You taught me with that thrust and pain
what life is
when you let go
of anything beautiful.
But isn't it its own kind of beauty,
what you did to me years ago?
We were always artistic,
you and I.
Someday
(not today or yesterday
not tomorrow)
I will learn
to hate you.
I'm doubting anyone will read all of these poems, but now they are here, and maybe someday they will help someone the way they've helped me.
1 comment:
thank you... i needed to hear that right now.
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