I observed you and the men you
Surrounded yourself with. The sounds
Your mouths made. I saw the women
Passing by. Everything unspoken in the
Polluted air. I picked up on everything
Your body signalled. I read bodies before
I could read books. You taught me that.
As a child. Languageless. Sex. Desires of men.
Women to be plucked and tasted, strained and
Shamed.
Coming back for more. Dysfunctional alpha males.
Pretence, the sick dance, the coveting, the polluting.
You taught me that my body didn’t have boundaries.
Everything was allowed. I had no say in it. Here to please.
Locked in beneath my skin, staring at your hungry faces
From within, trying out an undercurrent of detachment, I
Refused to drown, my nostrils up against the wall, in or out.
I hear the smacking of your lips still. Women, food, women, food.
I absorbed your sexuality. I observed it, internalised it. The abnormal.
The hide and seek. Behind their backs. In code. In innuendos. In whispers.
Careless, prey, hunting, devouring, double lives, double identities.
The greed, the women on your lists, the numbers, not names, the tits
And asses, not their names, the blonde, the brunette, the slurs, faces faded,
Insubstantial, inconsequential. Did I still have a face to you, father?
When you stumbled home with all the juices on you, your skin,
Your lips, face, fingers, clothing, smoke-infested, libidinous, and
You touched me, you, always shameless, getting high on the secrecy,
Smiling, clandestine, teaching me a broken sexuality, a heartless one,
Disconnected, possessive, obsessed, addictive and shallow, your heart
Had never been in it.
Cock of the walk, I bought it, I didn’t know better, I trusted you
And what you represented, what you lived in front of me.
I wasn’t blind. I could see. Enough. To understand. Without words.
The stuffer of women. Quiet. They never mattered for more than an hour
Or two. Oh, and your mother of course, the only holy woman, the only
Good one. What did you do exactly when he beat the shit out of her?
You had a heart for her when she died, then you came running to help,
She had to die to matter, to become a saint, posthumously.
You never did anything to interrupt the cycles of violence.
You ran as far away as you could but you took everything
With you. Smacking. Smacking your lips. Wanting to eat.
Eat women alive. Sacrificial lambs. Meat platters for men like you.
Bones, garbage, dog’s teeth, digestion, repulsion, forgetting all about them.
And you come home to teach me, what exactly? What have you ever learned?
I need to get this off my chest. I need to get you off my chest.
Croque-Melpomene 