This Dalian prison feels eternal! I stretch across the bounds of matter:
A child frozen in time, an adult melting into darkness, a spirit riding the back of the wind,
and the child drives the adult to an excruciating distraction.
She pierces the heart with her screams, she will not be ignored.
I abandoned her once in the wilderness, she was damaged goods and it was life or death —
She lay weak and broken and beyond saving
I couldnt take her with me, because she looked at me with my own eyes
Except hers shone with tears and bled the loss of innocence and told all our secrets.
My conscious mind buried her there in the woods, she didnt resist.
I held her responsible for all of it, and she didnt even challenge that.
How could she let that happen to us? Fist and boot, sword and noose, slur and song - and she stopped fighting.
It took me years but one day I felt her move and knew she was alive.
Her eyes bore into me pleading me to take her back; asking me to love her.
I was afraid of her at first; of her wounds and weakness and wanting.
Her fingertips grazed mine; and the our two parts became whole
with a collosal iron clang forcing out echoes of screams cried long ago,
and they were hers and mine. We fitted into each other like russian dolls,
not neatly but with a post-war stagnant silence and scent of blood spilling still.
I tried to be with her, but her need was great —
And I knew she wanted all of me and that meant I must embrace all of her.
She wouldnt be ignored anymore, and was brutal in her attention seeking.
She forced me into her memories, our memories and left me to live what she endured.
She tried to make me see that she saved me, us, herself, but I couldnt understand
How she could torment me this way; relentlessly; painfully; vividly:
I wondered if she was taking revenge on me,
that her ghost was rattling her chains, binding me with them, drowning us both.
And for a long time the two of us tore our body apart and gave way to the weight of madness.
She vomited rainbows inside me and danced me along the cliff edge.
I breathed the whole weight of my darkest days into her till she choked,
as if I thought I could somehow **** her with toxins.
She took up blades and cut my flesh and grew more and more savage with each stroke.
And my body, our body became a war-torn country, the battleground
on which we played out the assaults of our reunion.
One day she regressed to a foetus, ******, transparent and whimpering like a wounded dog.
I saw her then, she was entirely helpless, she gave up to save us both,
And I’d been blaming her all these years, and all she wanted was to be loved —
Spending her days behind masks and dying inside,
And I had wished her dead, pretended she was dead and she let me live.
She bound and gagged herself and selflessly gave herself up for me,
And I wasted the life she gave me, repeating mistakes,
Full of bitter resentment, burning up joy like oil and wallowing in it.
I wanted still to force her out.
But throughout the years she remained and she kept me me and fighting still —
The strength that surrendered her to brutal assault,
is the same strength that keeps me drawing breath into my lungs when the darkness comes.
The waif soaked, salted, drenched clamped to my leg
was the same child who lay down and endured so that there might be light.
I regret I still blamed her, but I did so with great discomfort.
I imagine a time when we might be able to embrace in the light —
We are of course one and the same, ourself in different times.
I know now you cannot love with half a heart or smile with half a mouth.
She is the colour, and I am the canvas,
together we could make something beautiful and bright.
And Im listening to her cries now, sometimes I stroke her hair,
Perhaps one day I will hold her tight - then there will be love, light and life.
Written June 2011
