Explicit Childhood

My mommy used to call me bitch. Little piece of shit and high-and-mighty cunt. Am I your little peanut or a fucking cunt? Scream, slap, strangle--basic domesticity amiss. I tried not to hurt her back--hurt myself--or ruin something out of anger that I might miss. For every try, two more fails, yelling, scratching, high-pitched wails of "Let me go!" and "Leave me alone!" and when left like that, crying and quaking, asking to myself aloud, "Why are you so mean?"

It got old, and I got older. I got out and in grew colder... 

Now I creak from bed onto the floor, then to my door and somehow I'm showered and dressed. There's a pile of envelopes--statements, requests--and I look at them with disdain and pray to myself not to become my mother...

*

I lived in The Land of The Bills are Not Paid, where the citizens skipped some days of water, or light. And light means heat, so yeah, it was cold. And as I got older it colded much colder--and such woe that sleeping with socks on feels so not right...But the cold subdued the fleas, a nice relief, not thinking about the zillion mini-beasts attacking my skin pink in the night.

Imagine the embarrassment of that twelve-year-old citizen, who, even after shaking her things before leaving home, finds--still--black demon dots upon her school desks. Get it! Kiil it! Catch the bastard before anyone sees--the proof of such shame: we, the people with fleas.

In The Land of Nothing Gets Cleaned, domesticated cats reign on high. There, Wild children exist--one woman's patterns, gone inexplicably awry. The odd wonderfulness of an upbringing untamed, yet, such doubt in my head, nursing silent dread that my life's somehow wrong, wrecked before I could get here to save it, and that these words exist only to make that fear strong...

--Am I wrong? Am I wrong here? Who can tell me what's wrong here, and why does it feel like it sounds like it feels? It almsot feels like it's not even real...

And where are the words that fit such dark margins, to contain in a verse the stains of youth in despair,

And the levity scoured from it?

*

Now this night, and I feel slightly ill, in my heart and head and stomach--like I want to vomit. It's an ailment that has so quietly bred, spread, placed just between the things to ignore and the things to never think on again. 

I'm cold.

I'm tired. 

And even so, find myself acutely inspired to shamelessly purge-by-truthing:

This sickness from home that isn't my own, 

I'm ready to let it go.

 

 

Posted via email from Prosetry