Aftershock

and even after all these years i still remember visiting houses

of mothers lacking spouses and thinking normality

like my own, absent father too “busy” with his art

divorced after what, a year of marriage in the 90s.

free spirit meets foreigner in a field and the rest is history,

the rest is quick love, the rest is me.

the rest is my mum, bless her heart, married in a green dress

unaware of the curse, or the inevitability.

pregnancy and cigarettes and stories that i’ve heard not experienced

trickled out like honey, like blood, over the years bit by bit.

abuse and shit stained toilets he made her clean and

divorce and then a single mother in a block of flats with a baby

who would grow up to be a five year old who was already thirty

a ten year old who was already hurting,

crying because she can’t remember her daddy hitting her when she was younger

but he did, or so she’s told but she wasn’t old enough

so the memory faded from her bruised head.

and then a daddy who hasn’t paid his way and a daughter,

bitter, my god freud would jerk one off if he heard this

but he’s dead, and she knows that likewise when daddy dies

she won’t cry over the arrogant fuckwit that remarried without so much as a word,

but he still has the nerve to call me insolent over the phone,

the man i haven’t seen in five years and haven’t loved in ten,

but i guess i’m just damaged goods.
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I just wanted to try my hand at writing performance poetry after spending about an hour listening to Mary Lambert's Body Love on repeat. I guess you have to write about what you know so that's what I did. Should really be read aloud.