No Escape - A Poem

 

 

NO ESCAPE

You can’t escape a bad childhood,

no matter how you pretend.

You can wrap it up in denial,

and place it in the deepest, darkest

corner of your mind’s closet;

let the cobwebs spin until it’s

completely hidden, or so you think.

But, then, one day when you least

expect it, it jumps out at you,

tears you up from the inside, shreds

your confidence, steals your self-esteem,

leaves you so low you fear

to move lest you fall any lower.

The memories flood out, leave a bad

taste at the back of your throat,

a stench in your nostrils as purely

nauseating as any old outhouse.

Your visions open up,

scenes of ugly secrets revealed,

too ugly to speak of,

to put into words. Better to subdue it,

even if the madness

threatens you for holding it all in.

Love comes in spite of you, in the guise of

an angel-haired, musclebound teenager, your

soulmate, the only human you ever

felt comfortable with. He was joyous, possessive,

but fiercely yours. Then came

the babies, three laughing Buddhas, your own

private religion. Life was busy enough

to drown out the past, or so you thought.

But Lord how you loathed the

holidays, pretending to be merry,

when inside your heart was bleeding,

your mind forming words of Truth

that were too heavy to reach the

surface. They didn’t know you,

The Real You, and they didn’t want to.

They kept sacred some blessed,

blasphemous image of a perfect

child who was not, could never have been you,

not with a childhood

like yours. No way!