I stared into the dead faces of your parents.
The black and white blurred photograph.
The past that managed to become present in
The house you built. How you brought them in.
Back in. How you never let go. You continued to
Spin their vicious circles, around your fingers
And mind, around our throats, reperpetrating their
Lifelong thirst for violence and extinction of their
Own children.
What did he think it would do if he laid hands on you?
Beat you with his belt? Did he think it would make you
A better person? Did she try to cure all the wounds he
Inflicted by telling you the world is yours, all women are
Yours to take and throw away, bodies to inhabit and leave,
That she belongs to you only, that she lives only to serve you,
After he’s done with you, after he eroded love from your body,
She would come into the equation trying to recuperate everything
After she saw the damage that he had done, suddenly taking her
Power back, the mother, complacent, helpless, the curer, picking
Up the shards within you without you, assembling you anew,
Deconstructed, she would never agree to destroyed, never.
What did you, in fact, become?
She made you believe in worlds that you couldn’t see.
She told you with her actions that you are superior,
That all your suffering will fade away soon, that you
Are her golden boy, and she fed you to fill the deep hole
That your father knocked into you. She made it pour over.
She never found the right words. Not the right actions either.
She reacted. Your father acted. One poison over another, poured,
The layers, of you, my father, and I look at their faces, on their
Wedding day, crooked smiles, sideways, she, in the beginning of
An idealised dream, he, incompatible and standing before a mission
That had already failed, he had it in him, he knew, and she thought
That it had ended with her father or perhaps she loved him
Because he resembled her own father. Who knows? Ad absurdum.
That photograph in the centre of your field of vision.
You held on to both. The roots of your wrongdoings.
Unquestioned. Accepted. Sunken in. Spread and infested.
Love can be such an empty word and sound, bones, no meat,
Or it can consist of so many other things, coveted, veiled,
Lying and pretending, the complete opposites of love,
Sold and bought as love, the ever-changing concept, the layers
Peeled away, deeper and deeper, holes, vanished, gone missing, hurt.
You and that photograph. Not of your own wedding.
Not of us. You’d never look at us. You looked back.
Did you look back at your own self? What they did to
That little boy? Would you recognise him at all?
Why did you never want his company? Conjure him up?
Frame him? Look at him. You could have had it in you
To finally give him love, set him truly free of inherited
And repeated bondage. You throttled him like they did.
And there they are in your house, everywhere you go,
The father’s love and belt strokes and the mother’s
Useless helping hand that didn’t interfere when it mattered most.
Croque-Melpomene 