With doors slammed shut
And secrets roaming the corridors,
No demons or devils can escape this broken frame
Because the walls know too much,
They have seen too much.
The household is no longer holding it together
It breaks down in bits and pieces,
And wails of righteous mistakes.
When our hearts became too shattered to clatter at rock bottom
When we ran out of beloved people to break,
We ruined the things we loved,
Like the moon lamp I used to keep on my bedside table:
Hurled it one night across the room straight to the cold, tiled wall,
Too jealous of its internal light –
Like the green water bottle she smashed to the ground one evening,
And a bunch of “I’m sorry”s that she expected would keep me hydrated.
Staying under one roof doesn’t necessarily translate to home;
It can sometimes mean that the world ends way before it actually does;
It spirals away slowly into the abyss
Fight by fight
Heartbreak by heartbreak
Family by family
Till it turns to a black hole,
Starving
Wild
Eternal
Feeding on leftover dreams and hopes
Of building a new household one day.
On the outside I am a rope
Keeping this rocking boat at bay.
On the inside I am a thread
In dire need of a life jacket myself.
Just like a small piece of wood can
Clog a hole,
The youngest child becomes a dam,
stopping the flood,
rescuing the boat.
But some floods are inevitable,
And so the guilt washes over the shore.
Skyscrapers stand on my back
As the shame, and blame tower over the fame
And turn me into a city I do not want to reside in:
here the water runs over
And the electricity wires hug
attached and lethal;
The city reeks of their forbidden love.
The buildings fall down floor by floor,
And the tenants frantically run around
on glass, wood, and aluminum shards;
Any escape is a good one
In a household that is falling apart
With children parenting the parents
And parents sinning like they’re teens,
Living in their own heads and on their own terms.
They put on a public show
As the happy little family
And I was never quite the actress,
So I cast out the outrage on mute.
I wonder how many more broken ornaments we will have to clean up before they stop selling fractured smiles.
I wonder how many more poems I will have to write
About mothers and monsters
About being homeless in a house
About a cry out for help
Before the help becomes yet another reason to cry –
How many more poems will they dismiss as
Just poems.
When the vow of “til death do us apart”
Is taken too seriously,
We all secretly wish to die.
How does a household
Hold on for a little bit more life?