The soft Iliad

Part one: The Youth

with a passion of adventure, I scrubbed my parent’s kitchen walls, cleaned the floors to the touch of a cold toe

I felt so raw as the sun hit my eyes like the old rag

I

Didn’t know rage unless I soaked up that sweat from a tv screen

Unless I heard a cry that wasn’t mine

Then I felt older than a WW1 veteran

But in reality

I was a young girl with pearls I couldn’t clutch

Part two: The middle aged as a teenager

with great grit that couldn’t stand up to a push

The ball was never in my court

I learned my lessons, I took my literal punches and my physical blows

I cried like a widow when I saw my youth play out like a long, slow shot of a movie-style gun before it was even over

Eyeing my reflection in a masculine glance as though my eyes were not my own eyes

And my body was a whole gift to look at

Though I completely fell in love with myself as no one told me I couldn’t

That I was not all I was made up to be

Part three: War ravaged adult form in a country far away

How can one confidently believe all the horse shit they once passionately said in vain as a child

“I love my body,” and “I love everything about myself”

after you were viscerally torn apart each and every moment of your adult life

As a youth, you were Aphrodite to yourself

A love that rang like no other

But the echo chamber said something far beyond the shadows of that surface

When you realize you can be punched, bloody and dirty and bruised and spit on literally without anyone noticing or blinking an eye

Anything and everything you now say about yourself that sounds even slightly better than shit, bitch, cunt, whore, lazy, stupid, ugly,

Is sounding kinda lame and goody-good

Well, I can’t blame my body dysmorphia

On words spat out in hatred, self hatred, jealousy, whatever the psychological reason was for abusing me

Then if I admit that, I’ll really feel like I had no control over the last 16 years of my existence

I have to be a survivor instead of a victim

Because of the way victim behavior affects the brain

And selfishly omits the fact that others have no food, no water, no medicine and nothing to show

For that child in a bomb-shelter cocoon

That is in a war ravaged adult form in a far away country

Part four: the end

Off point, love is really a bomb shelter

That is sturdy at first, a home even

You let all the little firecrackers go off in your face

You let all the people lay waste to your own skin

The bombshells will never leave, the earth will always stay even if it shakes violently and demands to be split

You stay inside while the rest of the world hears the booming music of your destruction

Lifting your eyes to a burning sky

Your poem, The soft Iliad,

Comes out to breathe

All the ink finding its way back into the pen

Don’t write this stuff, it’s private

It’s not anyone’s business

Don’t make a fool out of yourself

But I recall someone who made a story out of raw hands scrubbing a wall

Dreaming of something out of nothing

Making nowhere her mouth

And something out of a box that opened up dreams

For this is the stuff of what you needed to actually know to start your new life

With a gesture of a hand that will soak up your pain with a soft velvet verse

And a crackling whip of a sharp word

To wake

You

Sleepers

Up.