Everybody loves the idea of an artist
Nobody wants to hear about the trauma
That gives such great breadth to the words
That kept them hanging on during poetry nights
I couldn't write about living in a closet
My body not my own long e'er I picked up a pen
I wrote about longing for death so much that
It was mistaken for some great romance
Desperate to voice the truth of her captors
We did it in fucking iambic pentameter
So the people who scorned us and called us a poseur and a slut
Might get some sense of order
As chaos dripped out our pores like sweat and ichor
I gave voice to pain like a grand Epic
Couldn't understand why they made you feel so much
They stopped laughing when I tried to write something too real after being kidnapped
The words of fiction ran out
But still they called it high drama as they applauded
And all we hear is the monster's breath
Before we could write our whole name
The name that monster gave us
That people have such a hard time
Show you what black heart
Still struggles to beat beneath my breast
Will you shrink away again?
Will they once again suggest I write a book about my life, not understanding the pages they hunger to read?
They so rarely know how to love the poet
When she's awake all night
Cleaning house so she can find the lost rhythm of writing long gone
You all want pretty words
But nobody wants me sobbing at 4am
When I don't want to live like this anymore
When the ghosts in the closet keep waking
When Death no longer wants to speak
When my whole thread of consciousness
CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE AHEAD/ BEHIND
But then suddenly nobody wants to read anymore.
You stop here because the pages of my life are too much to understand, to hear, to read.
We know, friends, readers, lovers, all;
It was too much for us to bear too.
Too normalized before we knew right from wrong.
They sent a cop when I finally found the courage to speak up.
Because we were bought and sold, we already knew his face when he came to our door.
Sophia lost her voice that day.
"But why is it so hard to quit smoking," they all wonder
Because nobody wants to help heal the healer
Nobody wants to help a lost poet write again instead of cut or smoke or drown pain in a bottle of Valium and tequila until you don't ever wake up like my sister did.
The girl who secreted us out of our house before my father's parties, knowing she was going to be raped at 13 but she wanted to save 6 year old me when she could. She couldn't bear to see 32. And here I am, still managing to breath 19 years later.
It's so hard to quit smoking because people never see trauma. They only see addiction and drama and they're just so tired and want to hang up the phone already. Like they did on my sister. And then they wondered why she chose death after the dial tone.
It's hard to quit addiction when nobody around us can stay awake when you can't sleep and you're a healer trapped in a hostage situation with a polygragmented system stuck in a flashback cycle and Misery just KNOWS we could sleep better if we used the razor on our altar from our ex girlfriend who happened to be another one of our rapists. Lucky for her, Frey put all the blades away weeks ago when the first in our house started to crack at the seams and the rest of the adults looked ready to soon follow suit. We weren't wrong. It doesn't really take a prophet to foresee that after all.
Our daughter wants to do a portrait for each of our headmates. Bless them. I don't know if their question of who all lives in our head made me want to laugh or cry first.
We dated a psych major, you see. None of our friends back then knew he was also a rapist and a pedophile. But I did. Then he took all of our journals and 7 pages of listed headmates The Archivist had managed to categorize and burned them right in front of a 5 year old version of me and said not to worry, just to Get. In. The. God. Damned. Car, this one last time, please Bat? He says I'm poison. I'm what a crazy ex girlfriend looks like. I still remember when he asked me how long it was going to be before I talked about him like I did about my ex fiance. He convinced everybody that I was a pathological liar before he left, did we ever tell you that? He had us so twisted inside out some of us started to believe that ourselves. So we took that misunderstanding to therapy. That we imagined it all in a psychotic episode and were just one person that grown men never touched.
It doesn't always work the way we want.
Sometimes the words don't do what I wish they would.
But sometimes, instead of cutting, or smoking, or drinking, or trying to fuck my way out of pain, it can just become writing that people relate to.
I'm tired of writing pretty words.
Welcome to something new.
It's the source of all this rage and pain
And the art everybody was always so hungry to devour.
I used to refuse to write it.
I used to say I don't owe anybody my pain for the sake of entertainment.
But the silence is deafening.
If any of this made you feel less alone
I survived so much more than I've put words to here.
