Poetry | Stories | Photography
My daughter’s scared of death,
yet the dead live all around us.
She cries to me about the ghosts,
yet the ghosts won’t harm us.
My daughter shivers at the corners,
yet there is no one to scare us.
She tells me of the evil monsters,
yet there is no evil to touch us.
My blossoming daughter, she runs,
yet dead sorrow cannot touch us
for she lives
and
I am dead
I watch you walk into the room;
you are a beautiful masquerade.
A confident air hangs around you,
for you have never known “No”.
I watch you stand and sit so well,
then give me a look of disgust.
The player amongst many players,
you are an amusement to watch.
I sit and wait for the hammer to fall,
it doesn’t, and I wonder when it will.
A fault in that elegant demeanour shows,
for one man sees behind the masquerade.
I see you frown and flinch at his words,
then recede into the shadows tonight.
An entertaining amusement for the sick,
I take no pleasure in seeing you fall.
Tonight I will sit and wait for you to return;
so many lessons to learn, sweet daughter.
My ovaries laugh when he says kind things, yet they won’t get the chance to see you come into the world. You will be born of other parents, and I will remain barren and alone, or is it just the hormones telling me lies?
I have struggled with the choices I made for a few good reasons.
I struggle without my imaginary daughter; then I wonder if she came into the world, it would never be as I imagined.
There’s too much horror for broken people like me, so we:
mature later,
laugh hard, and
hurt more
for so many long-winded reasons.
I see the socially acceptable normal ones, the ones who have it all. I see them, and then I look deeper.
Cracks lay across the picture. Black ink seems to smear parts of the image. Underneath, there are pieces of them hurting, hating, hiding, hitting, kicking and screaming, dying, crying and lying.
I see no normal ones. Instead, I see many filters blocking out reality. I see myself in the mirror, and I know that life is about fate and destiny, yet life is also about strength and courage. Life is about love, but not this anger that’s consumed me for too long.
Sitting and feeling sadness boil into anger and resentment, I write it all out. Perhaps I will never have my daughter is a given now, yet perhaps so many others will not too.
C & K 