The world would never work for me.
I heard that many times before.
Sometimes I would let this sentencing sink in
To my own destruction.
Crouching, stuck in my body,
Contemplating how to dissolve into a mystery that
Nobody would ever comprehend. There was no end to the
Disaster drainage and I’d hold my own weight and
Made it to my bed to sleep on all the things that were said
To me. I was sure that they’d fall asleep too.
I wonder what you were thinking, setting all these limits.
These incantations of self-alienation. Where did you see
Me in the future? What kind of woman would I become?
According to your sense of reality? And hopelessness, lack of
Imagination and craftsmanship?
How did it help exactly to keep me
In your self-made barn of misery and decline?
Teach me the art of self-denial, moulding myself after others,
Ambushing my own skin one piece at a time?
You taught me how to unlove myself like a sweet old
Lullaby that slithered its way through the whole family.
The criticism you practised was stomping a house of cards down
With your words and disillusionment.
What made you stop to be yourself?
What made you so bitter that you thought you were affectionate
By telling me all the things that I am not and that I cannot achieve?
I still feel your eyes on me when I eat,
The way you stuck around to observe me towards the finish line,
And you gloated, bursting with shame and horror
To have brought someone like me, someone like you, into this world.
The world outside of your warmongering walls always seemed a better place.
I was addicted to you in many ways, the bruises, the scars, burns and lectures.
Maybe I told myself that they were hymns of care to comfort myself and keep
Me whole and alive to blast your cage of mediocrity and frustration, to make it out
Of there, of you and who I thought was me.
I had never been what you baptised me to be.
I could walk in a million other directions and I did
And you reappeared on the sidelines,
Sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a tear.
I’d run and forget and sometimes I’d look for you
And halt for just a moment to remember all the reasons why
I was on my way
Or why it was important to look you in the eye standing on my own two feet.
