Today my trauma wants a poem written about it. It wants to be heard like the fierce crack of thunder when everyone is looking at the gorgeous lightning. It wants to be made more beautiful than it is, to be wrapped up in metaphor and disguised on stretched canvas.
It wants to escape the soft trembling cage of my body and scamper around stepping on people's toes and scratching their legs and licking their faces and saying look, look what she carries inside her.
See how she says no to the right people and yes to the wrong ones. See how she plunges into healing like tumbling off a cliff during a storm. How she can't help dragging the sandpaper of memory across her tender skin. How she forgets that safety feels like pulling the blankets up around her ears at night. Like quiet, like sunshine and dappled shade. Like a purring cat that won't leave her alone. Like kisses that don't make her tremble. That love doesn't have to feel like it's going to blow up inside her.
My trauma wants to be all alone like a lighthouse, a beacon for where not to go. It wants company that can stroke its raised hackles but doesn't know what that means or how to ask. It wants to change its name into an un-pronounce-able calm. It wants to tell you everything, like the rings of a tree hold history. It wants to forget everything. It doesn't know how to end this poem.
