Pieces and Reasons

I find myself searching for reasons why
my childhood self was so broken,
and why at 32 I’m still a ways away
from that strange state called contentment.
 
Why it was, as a kid, my hygiene was so poor,
to the point I’d rather piss myself
than leave my room, and left shit in
the washing machine. Why I’d let my hair
grow until it scratched my neck red raw,
and why I lived afraid of everything,
even my dreams, which would have given Freud
a theory or two, comprised as they were
of sex with older family members.
Why I ate and ate and ate
despite the humiliation of growing up fat
in a family obsessed with appearances.
 
The pieces falter and fragment.
Running upstairs from my mother at 5,
feeling her palm on the back of my head
as my brothers and I sat sadly at breakfast,
unsure whether to wait or make it ourselves,
which would enrage her more.
 
Why I was fat, and feral,  
and weak, and perverse.
 
Why I dreamt about having to fuck
my parents and older brothers,
why I’d lay covered in piss and shit
with hair like a Stone Age orphan.
 
It’s taken years but I’m less inclined
to blame myself for what I was when young,
the weird animal uncurled upon the hearth,
more woodland beast caged up and whipped
to submission than child of the internet
and boy band age. Would it profit me to know
if mum or one of her boyfriends went all the way
with me to where no child should be brought,
or if the past was just a more prosaic type
of hitting and neglect? It’s not as if I need
a backstory for Pop Idol, or pitch to please
a publisher with this year’s misery memoir:
 
A Child Covered in Shit.
 
Even the rage is slowly subsiding. I’ve not
called mum a vapid junkie slut
in several months at least, and dad’s
in other streets than these,  
the conversation’s ending sealed
by crematorium rollers. Sometimes all you have
are pieces and poorly glimpsed reasons,
and sometimes that’s enough.