I Roar (my truth from treetops)

When I was a little girl my face was plump as a full moon,    
My body young and unable,    
I'm sure you were there, aided by those wiser.    
In the first year you fell in love with another man, a different man to my faceless father whom you didn't want to allow  
Into the tale of my life  
And you became pregnant again but he didn't want it  
Like you thought  
He might  
And so you gave it away on New Years Day  
But changed your mind and hurt a family, lied about them, sullied their new emerging family    
but this is my story and not theirs  
And I was left  
With you  
And your fallen mind  
Where your father  
And mother  
Had picked it loose like a chicken bone  
But this is my story and not yours.
 
 
I began staying with my great grandparents  
But only when they were on the right side  
Of my mother's mood  
Which my nan always said was very hard to do  
And she knew    
In the years that followed  
Of the days my mother would have parties,    
Pass out  
When the waft of earthy smoke would resonate  
And as far as I'm aware from workers in care  
They stood by her  
To say she was capable  
And conscribed me to my future  
There  
At the mad hatter's tea party  
Where men passed through as long, but likely to sink, ships in the night  
And my mother picked my skin until it bled, and her skin, and used tools on both in low light.
When the mood was high I was a burden, a thing to be passed from a drunk to women who hated me and thought because I was a single child I was spoilt, not that I was stuck  
In something toxic,
With an addict of her own misery and pain.  
On and on we rode 'long this awful road,  
Where I became settled into holding her when she cried  
And later bathing her, clothing her and making myself vinegar sandwiches  
When she was too tired and too proud to help me or ask for help from a carer -
But I wasn't even double figures.  
I think asking for help would have allowed people to see her blanket addiction to the wild hemp because
it cures all ails,    
didn't you know?  
And my heart grew sad and desperate and numb  
And by double figures I wanted to die,
To end my husk so bound to her  
For yet many years to follow -
Where breathing wasn't breathing  
And being was being  
At her every whim and whimper
Because, you see, the needing never stop  
Needing
Even when you're an empty cup  
Yet when she came home  
And found me nearly sleeping,  
A pain in my gut like I can't explain, 
She looked desperate and lonely and unloved.
I couldn't leave her there.
I told her,    
A fate worse than the gut,
As I was matched to a Doctor,
Made to believe I was mad. 
I started harming  
Because it is what mad people do  
When mad people are needed too much  
And can't be dying  
In the immediate future,
Talking to myself in mirrors,
Taking sedatives,
Hiding out at friends -
Who'd take me (?)
And hoping they'd swallow me whole.
Once I came home to coke on the table,  
Another time she was passed out, surrounded by dildos,    
Another she had a heroin addict squatting.
She made me hate me  
And when I came to,  
When I realised the years I had endured, loving her, of her holding me down and torturing my skin with tools, my mind with tales of her internal sickness, my body with the toxins of her precious plant  
I hated her.
Too tired from all the self absorption of anger and hurt because it was easier at the time.  
I moved in with her mother  
Which whilst better,
Whilst pointed me in a direction for calmer seas,  
Whilst pointed me away from a life  
Out of my head    
With nothing    
But her
- and my own delectable mortality  
Made it a game  
Between the woman with the vampire heart, who loved as she sucked the essence of joy from you
And the woman who turned a blind eye as she became that way.    
For years it went on,  
And I kept my head down, 
As two volcanoes sat side  
By side  
Spurting venom and then letting the other heal  
And repeating,  
Dreaming of getting out,  
Of being free  
Of being bathed clean in the milk of a splashing lagoon  
On a warm, lush green day  
By the woodland of elders who gathered my strength and  
Made it my food    
To nurture my innocent spirit  
All sullied with soot from the furnaces of competing woman.  
When my great grandma died, the mother of the mother of my mother,  
The earth sent to me a tree  
Grounded  
And sturdy  
And loving and forgiving and fruitful and stubborn  
And he planted a seed,  
In my spirit,
And he cut out the old pips with a knife. First went self harming, and smoking, and that toxic landscape  
And he gave me shelter and time and a garden with flowers and fruit  
And he gave me Fern  
And with her unfurling by the day I realised  
What I didn't deserve,  
What I can't carry with me,  
What needs to be cast away  
To prevent blight, to prevent damage and disease to this new garden.
So slowly, so quietly  
We built fences  
And put up gates,    
Made an Eden,  
Down, down by the lagoon of milk, beside the woodland of plenty.