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Audio for Spoken Word poem "the taking".

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Audio for Spoken Word poem "the taking".

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I messed up and giggled around the middle, but here it is

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I’ll start by saying that I am so
Tired.
I had a conversation today,
With someone who is so, incredibly
Draining.
And it took the life out of me.
You see, I am not meant to carry anyone's burdens except for my own,
But my mother,
Oh, my mother.

...
She’s my role model.
Or,
Is that a lie?
I can’t tell anymore.
She’s a woman who has endured so much, that much is true
But it is now that I see
She refuses to deal with her own things,
And instead puts them on other people.
It’s me, it’s me, it’s me.
I am the source of the guilt, I am the burden.
The biggest hardship she’s had to endure?
Me.
We have been struggling so much lately.
You see, I’ve gotten “too big for my britches”
That is to say,
I have gotten too confident,
But listen,
I have been put into a role that was not made for me,
I have filled shoes that I was not meant to wear,
I have become an adult in ways I was not supposed to,
Not.
Yet.
You see, I was robbed from a very young age.
My childhood was taken from me.
I endured hardships no child should ever have to endure
I became “mommy’s little helper” when I was 8 and I was taught,
Like so many little girls,
“Boys will be boys,” so, “Zip your lip” and “Smile.”
You see, when I came crying to my mother about a boy who almost broke my wrist,
She said so softly,
“Do you need to take a nap, you’re awfully upset.”
No mother,
I need you to go over there and kick his mom’s as-
Sk me how you can help.
Ask yourself,
What can ease my pain within your capabilities?
You see, when I told my mom about my abuse,
When I broke down in front of her,
Wracked with guilt,
With fear,
With anger,
She had the nerve
The goddamn nerve,
To tell me that what I had experienced
Was not real.
You see, we are in therapy now,
Trying to balance out our mother-daughter relationship
And you can understand why I find it so ironic.
I did not take this power,
And I certainly don’t want it.
I do not wish to be the adult, the mother,
No more than she wishes to be the child, the daughter
Except she does.
You see, she was robbed too.
Her own mother took her childhood,
And made her fill shoes she wasn’t meant to,
And my mother tells me,
Oh, she tells me that she doesn’t want to be like her mother.
She never wants to do that.
But she is so blind.
She blames me, for not living life the way she has.
For refusing these roles,
For not sucking it up and smiling like she was taught,
For living the way that I want,
So that she can no longer enjoy living vicariously through me.
The burden, the problem, the mistake.
It isn’t me.
I am not at all responsible for what she is feeling; if she is feeling sad, she needs to recognize that.

She needs to get help for herself.

I can’t keep giving up pieces of me to take care of hers.

I need to be taken care of,

Because she is the mother.
And I am the child.

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This poem came from a very deep place. While being extremely raw, it is also very angry and I am basically just ranting. This free verse that I wrote came from the very center of my relationship with my mother. It covers our entire relationship, while somehow not saying nearly enough. It shows the discourse within my relationship with my guardian and starts off this project with a very dark introduction.

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the grim of the air is choking me
as I mourn the death of a loved one
who is not yet gone from this earth

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"You're the child, and I am the parent,"
My mother yells, and that is correct, I am the child.
I live in a home, no, a house:
where love is a desert, and resentment is a 50 ft. wave;
where when you go to your guardian for praise, you're left hanging;
where endearment is the horizon at the end of a winding road.

This place I've occupied for my whole life is a road
wherein at the end is my parent
screaming my name. Her intentions leave me hanging
because she hasn't met the needs of the child
within me. And yes, I am a kid, but that doesn't mean I'm supposed to ride this wave
of sadness for the whole of 18 years. Our house

was never a home. Each place we lived was nothing more than a place to house
my fears and trauma. The road
I've walked led me to the ocean and I let the wave
of truth overcome me. That truth being that my parent
is nothing more than a child.
I've walked, swam, and overcome alone. So, it is her that will be left hanging.

I am through with being left, hanging
around for loved ones who don't show up. I've build a fort out of the bones of a house
that I no longer live in. As a child
I was dropped, no, thrown down a road
of hurt and abandon. Thrown by my parent
the one person who was supposed to protect me, but instead she raised her hand, did a little wave

and said goodbye. Her love was a tidal wave.
It came and went. Her love was the witches of Salem. Dead in a tree, hanging.
She didn't get love from her mother, her parent,
So she didn't know how to give it to us, how to house
these wonderful emotions. So, she gave them up. She decided for me, that I would walk the road
of adulthood right away, and skip over being a child.

It breaks me, day in a day out, knowing that the time for being a child
is long gone. I regret so deeply that I had to wave
goodbye so early in my lifetime. That the path, and the road
I am to take was paved for me. That I yearn for a time where I could be the one hanging
from a tree. So that I would not have to house
my mothers heartbreak and be the one to parent

her. It hurts me so deeply to know that there are kids hanging from ceiling fans, a child
who felt the wave of depression build a home, no, a house
in their bones. And their parent did them a disservice by refusing to build a place of love, and instead offered a dead-end road.

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This poem feels kind of repetitive, but not in the way I want it to be. That, I would say, is my only regret about it. Other than that, this poem shows how the relationship with your parent can be so entrapping. You're stuck for eighteen years under siege and over that time you build up armor, but it isn't against a person, it's against the ocean. The ocean will kick anyone's butt and that's just the truth, so you're fighting the ocean for 18 consecutive years until you finally say, "Hey, ocean, you are gonna live your life trying to drown others, but you know what? I can swim. And whenever I feel like it, I can just leave you." And that's such a powerful truth to me.

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Not to be dramatic, but...
In this haiku, the emotion I'm trying to evoke is the sadness that comes with death. The devastation that you feel when someone dies, but it is revealed that no one has actually died. Instead, they are dead to you, but it hurts just the same.

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How can someone I love break me again and again?
I am being silly, of course.
No one has that much power, do they?
No, no, they do not. They and we like to think that they do. But, truly, no one has that much power over me.
I wish I could blame her, but in truth, I cannot.
She may have had a big part in building who I am, but in the end; it is me who decides who I want to be.
And who I want to be, is free. Is kind. Is good.
Very unlike what she has taught.
It starts today. I take the pieces back. I build.

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This is just a telling, and a conclusion, of how I feel about the entire situation. I close with softness. She doesn't control me, and like many teenagers, I have a want to rebel. I close with a gentleness, a kindness that is not found in the other poems. I chose free verse because it isn't organize, I get to choose how I want it to go. Perfect symbolism.