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CW: none.
In many ways, this poem is about an excruciatingly difficult childhood, but it is also about my found family, about the people who have helped me realize that the past is something you can leave behind, that you can exorcise, put away because there are better things to do than stay haunted by the dark.
this is a haunting, you explained. You were a child
but they made you both altar and offering
an effigy to burn. a red stain on white carpets. even if
they kept screaming it wasn’t like that,
don’t lie, it didn’t hurt.
you stayed, didn’t you? There was no pain
this was their haunting, their only inheritance
passed down like a judgement or a curse,
the kind like rough hands or worse,
like something in the dark saying, listen
we fed you, you’re alive, well,
you live, at least. wasn’t that enough?
they were everything, I said, and I meant it
but they broke the mirrors in every room
in my heart so I couldn’t look inside, so I made myself
into a tomb for them instead, a house they could haunt.
we loved you, we love you
we will always love you so play your part.
but they can be nothing now, you say, gently. You can
shed their poor scaffolding, their framed lies.
burn them,
clean your halls of their ghosts. that’s all they’ve ever been,
you say.
just ghosts.
so
take down their memory
clear the table
close your doors.
lock yourself up
this house is yours,
these floors, these walls.
Yours.
not theirs.
you don’t have to love them
this is a haunting, but you don’t have to stay haunted.
look up, you say.
the sky has broken and the light comes
to tear the past apart.
