What you see before you

are the skin and clothes of the living

and my dead.
A result of generations of love

or hate

or boredom on a Tuesday night

and a potluck of chromosomes
The gene pool of my ancestors

drying up in my shallow end
Distilled into hereditary faults

that I forgive them for because they resulted in me.
I observe through my mother’s eyes
They show me that inaction causes stagnation
That stagnation causes resentment
That resentment causes a paralyzing fear
THAT fear festered rudely in my cradle

visited by vacationing cockroaches from upstairs
Unlike my one-eyed father, blindness is not mine.
My eyes are opened

when my mother reads me lies from a book of fairy tales

because I know that imaginary monsters aren’t real
That the real monsters look like people

they tend not to hide under my bed
instead, they sneak into my bed

a candy-colored catastrophic cruelty
Thieving my innocence,
Shackling me in guilt and shame
reinforcing that there is nowhere to hide
No closet is deep enough,
no blanket is tightly wrapped enough
No pillow will help my breath
Swaddling complacency
Nurturing tar black secrets

Forbidden by death
To verbally vomit
My truth abandoned in cobwebs

Chronological milestones

Amalgamated rubble

Duct taped together

Glued with lies, rejection,

Abandonment, and

A visceral faith that I was the broken one.

denunciation was not implanted

on those who blighted me.

Conversely, desperately

I believed.

I once had the courage to tell a student teacher

When I was 9 years old that I didn’t want to be a girl

I didn’t want to feel the way I was feeling anymore

I wanted to have the power of being something else

Because even then I knew that what I was,

WHO I was

Wasn’t like the other kids.

I had no lighthouse to guide my loose sailing

I had no anchor to throw over the side

To halt the rocking, storm-battered ship

That I’d been given to captain with no skills.

That teacher gently corrected me

to crash on the rocks instead

There was no safe harbor in which to moor

But…

There was something inside of me

A luminosity that crusaded for freedom

A light so obscured to me

by external destruction that I was blind to it

But I could feel it, warm in the darkness.

Growing exponentially with each fear abated

With each discovery excavated from shame

With each box opened, musty and dusty

The contents returned to owners

Who gave me their rejected anger,

shame and guilt disintegrated with antique fragility

I piled them up in the middle of the room

And I burned every bit of that judgement.

The fire rampaged uncontrolled

Scorching anyone who stood too close

Its flames reached unprecedented heights

With a destruction as violent as my life

Every step a new fire ignited

Every truth a testament

Every act defiant

No obstacle an impediment.

My raised fist declared my power

My resurrection burst forth from within

I am no longer defined by what was taken from me

But by what I bring with me to this world

What I create, nurture, give and receive

Is a reflection of that glorious light

I was destined to be.