Poetry: Standing Domino

Standing Domino

We are a mass of perceived worthlessness, of inadequacy and fear.
We hurt one another daily with our own hurt,
two bruises merging together to form one swollen heart.
We knock on like dominoes;
all it takes is a look,
a snort,
a flick of the hair or sometimes even
an absence.
Silence bruises more than words can say.

My sharpest weapon was made 12 years ago,
when my heart shattered under the weight of another’s pain.
I was a girl being squashed into a dark corner,
weeping and afraid,
eyes open so wide that I saw it all, and remember it all.
I was like the homeless soul in the coldest winter, catching every infection thrown at me.
I took rest and waited to recover,
but we never do.

Every scar we bear serves to remind us that we once bled,
that some alien object tore us open and poured out a part of our softness.
We become oxidised, dirtied by the elements, and seal ourselves shut,
feeling the faded lines only at night under the covers,
when we finally allow our breath to touch the space around us.
We pray that someday the light will fall upon our scars,
and we will trust ourselves enough to let alien eyes strip us human.

Three years ago, I drew a blade out from under my ribs and tore a hole in another’s eyes.
I blew on his tears until they turned to ice, and
smiled down the dark tunnel where I later exiled myself.
I found blind courage, my fingers gripping at the walls –
rough and open at first, but soon slipping out of the cracks –
losing my footing,
stumbling through the darkness towards an end which had no new beginning.
We never know where we’re going until we get there.

We collide like bumper cars –
deliberate and teasing, testing for a response,
expectant of the jolt but not of the weak limbs as we clamber from our rides and
silently dissipate to opposite ends of the world.
We laugh loudly, paint on smiles
and force ourselves to feel for strangers what we only wish we could feel for ourselves.
Our biggest crime is not the mask we wear, but the tongue we lash from it
and the perilous eyes which stare out, seeing but unseen –
the face which haunts the dreams of every child.
We have grown into adults who long to be children:
hopeful, unafraid,
with the faith that magic presents itself when we believe it should.
We want the world to tuck us in at night, tell us stories of happy ever afters
and love us because we have done no wrong...
But we have lived through lonely nights,
felt our breath cling to the closed-in walls around us and torn
the final page from the book before we’ve reached the end.
We have hurt, spread our poison like plague and turned
our burdened backs on who we swore we would become.

I am a woman who knows she cannot be a child,
and that hope may fade and fear may haunt, but that faith is of my own devising.
I devise a game of dominoes where one falls and the rest stay standing,
where pain is not contagious
and where we might someday tear our terrifying masks from our faces and smile
with a warmth we forgot we ever had.

We are a mass of perceived worthlessness, of inadequacy and fear.
I devise a world where we are not.

By Martha Everitt
August 2012