Dear Joe:

What a powerful poem, thank you for sharing it!

I like the structure of your poem, short lines. It brings these thoughts and feelings about my life experience:

“never free from souls of those long last… they dwell as ghosts… as cruel as they were back then..”- the abusers of my past, particularly my mother. “They moved on”- abusers move on because abusing relieves one of distress (the payoff). The abused don’t move on from acts of abuse because being abused causes distress (opposite to abusers’ payoff).

“they probably forgot and they think nothing of their evil laughter, cruel words, filthy venomous words spat out like acid reflux. malicious intent disguised as a harmless joke”- this makes me want to call out: people everywhere, please think before you talk, think of the consequences to the one hearing what you say. Think before you act disrespectfully toward another, dismissively. Think and care to not do it. Please!

“is it you, back from the dead here to stick the knife in once more? or is it i still here while you are in the land of the living?”- the abusers are alive in our brain, their words, facial expressions, acts, all recorded in our brain, playing back, alive and present.

“i’m no ordinary tiger. i’m one that shed its skin countless times, hit hunted poached scorched burned poisoned countless times.”- victims of abuse (and there are so many of us) do suffer a whole lot, surviving.

“you’re nothing. you’re weak, you’re cowardly….unable to speak your truth”- it takes strength to see the truth, and once you see it, to not run away, but instead to keep looking, keep seeing more and more of the truth. If an abuser saw the truth of his/ her abuse of another, it would be painful and so, undesirable. And so, they deny, minimize, blame others, and so on.

“i was trapped frozen and silenced in your prison. stone cold without a spark to call my own”- this is what being abused does, freezes the victim (literally, as in the Fight-Flight-Freeze response to trauma), imprisons the victim, deadening the victim so we lose that spark of life, that excitement about the moment, the day, the life in and all around us.

“times have changed, you are ice but i am flame”- the spark is not dead. As long as there is life, that spark, however weak, however discouraged, is still there.

“fire melts ice”- the fire of the abused never melts the ice of the abuser. The ice of the abuser unfortunately minimizes that fire, that spark until it is almost all gone.

“fire is pure, fire purifies, fire cleanses, fire illuminates”- We need that fire to be alive. I was always scared of fire, the fire inside, that is, became scared of any strong emotions. I hardly felt joy.

“come to me in the spirit if you must… but you best pray that you don’t come to me in the flesh. clearly nobody warned you that if you play with fire you’re going to get burned. and you picked the wrong person to play with”- the anger of the abused, that is fire.

Again, thank you. I hope you post more poems in the future, anytime, and/or your thoughts and feelings in other forms.

anita