Battle Of Evermore

When I was just a wee young thing,I was taught life's lesson well    
Ere instead of childhood revelry, mine would be a children's hell    
     
In this life of mine I've learned, you choose to live or choose to die    
That for some are chosen happiness, and for the rest to reason why    
     
I could weep and moan at life so cruel or lament in deep despair    
Would it help me if I wring my hands while pulling out my hair?    
     
Would it put me in a better place if I took it lying down?    
Nay, I think I would be just as dead if in self pity I did drown    
     
So I did, I think, the only thing my childish mind could do    
With the power of imagination  and a fantasy or two    
     
I would don a suit of honor, I would guard o'er children's door    
And like any worthwhile soldier,  I would battle evermore    
     
While most children softly slumber dreaming dreams that hold no fright    
As the children's chosen warrior  who had taken up their plight    
     
I did lay awake and listen in the darkness through the door      
For the sneaking sound his bare feet made, down hall on linoleum floor    
     
As I pray to a god who was not there, to help my battle plans go right    
Twas I alone in the dark with my Ball and Jax, who would be waging war this night    
     
With my hands I stifled giggles, my mind envisioning in the black    
Of the pain, glorious pain, to befall his feet as he stumbled on my Jax    
     
I laughed as I lay there pondering, if the makers of this children's game    
had ever dreamed that their tiny Ball and Jax would one night save four girls from shame    
     
HUSH! I hear him coming!  I have caught him unaware    
when his feet crossed o'er the battle lines. I swear his scream would curl your hair    
     
I laughed till I cried as he hopped while he tried    
to get away from my midnight attack    
Under the unscrewed hall light, he stood cursing the child      
who had left out her Jax in the night    
     
The beating was worth all the joy and the mirth    
that his dance down the hall gave that night    
     
After winning round one I vowed I would fight on    
Evermore as a soldier FIGHT ON.    
     
     
I'd decided as a very young child of abuse, that I would never go down without a fight.    
I spent my entire childhood and teenage years in a silent battle with my father.    
     
A battle never spoken of, but a battle none the less    
     
The battle this night was only one of the many battles my father and I would have over my body and soul.      
     
Because my father was so much stronger than me, he could physically and forcefully take things from me which he had no right to, things I would never give him willingly.    
     
But no matter how hard he tried, he could not take what was inside of me. I never let him take my spirit or my soul, because it was these inner things that kept me alive.    
     
My body no longer mattered to me, I couldn't let it matter to me because my father owned it.    
     
But my integrity was not something he could take by shear force. It and my spirit were the only things that were really mine.    
     
Remember that. Your spirit inside, your mind and thoughts and will to survive,integrity, self worth, love and hatred, emotions. Everything that makes a person, a person.    
They can never take that from you if you don't let them. NEVER    
     
Life is good, if you only work at it a little.