Witness To My Shame

Memories... Light the corners of your mind

Misty watercolour memories

Of the way things were.....

It's been several months since any "new" memories surfaced. There are those "out in the real world" that doubt the victim when new memories come to the surface. I will be totally honest, when I get these memories I doubt myself. Unfortunately with the memories come other "proofs", confirmation that those horrors bubbling on the surface are very much real.

I've spent most of my adult life knowing that I had been abused sexually. It was only when other problems brought immense emotional and mental stresses that the depths of that abuse became clear. Last autumn I thought every door had been unlocked, every drawer opened, every stone turned over.

I was wrong.

I have always felt insecure. Self doubt and self loathing has been an unwelcome lifetime companion. The insecurities result from the way I was treated growing up, the conditional "love", doing what I was told to do in order not to be punished. Listening to the lies of adults, accepting blame for things when I was innocent. The list goes on and on...

I cannot put the latest memories down as FACT yet, so wrote this....

I wish I could curl up and die
Crying over the pain a waste of tears
I open my mouth and scream silently
The filthy hands invaded and defiled again

Forced to sleep at his side so sickening
I lay there naked, shivering and bleeding
My life a lie, my purpose to serve
it all appears surreal, in the blackness

My body aches, stinging and bruised
I open my eyes, I look around, hoping
searching for a way to escape
Knowing I cannot, must not.

Through the darkness I see my teddy bear
My sleep aid, cast aside, tarnished
A silent witness to my lasting shame
My innocence raped, my mind fractures.

He wakes from drunken sleep,
His hand searches for me, I tense
His finger invades, I clench
He snores again, finger left in place.

I pray for someone to take me away
I imagine flying, soaring through the sky
Anything to blank out my reality
He moves, his bitten nails cut into me.

Warrior

This is the best time of the day—the dawn
The final cleansing breath unsullied yet
By acrid fume or death’s cacophony
The rank refuse of unchained ambition
And pray, deny me not but know me now,
Your faithful retainer stands resolute
To serve his liege lord without recompense
Perchance to fall and perish namelessly
No flag-draped bier or muffled drum to set
The cadence for a final dress parade
But it was not always thus—remember?
Once you worshipped me and named me a god
In many tongues and made offering lest
I exact too terrible a tribute


Take heed for I am weary, ancient
And decrepit now and my time grows short
There are no honorable frays to join
Only mean death dealt out in dibs and dabs
Or horror unleashed from across oceans
Assail me not with noble policy
For I care not at all for platitude
And surrender such tedious detail
To greater minds than mine and nimbler tongues
Singular in their purpose and resolve
And presuming to speak for everyman

Oh, for another time, a distant field
And there a mortal warrior’s lonely grave
But duty charges me remain until
The end the last battle of the last war
Until that ‘morrow render unto me
That which is mine my stipend well deserved
The fairest flower of your progeny
Your sons, your daughters your hopes and your dreams
The cruel consequence of your conceit..

Steve Earle