Amidst a higher education, a lower.
With learning, an unlearning.
I mean this:
A-plus. Magna cum laude.
A handshake and long walk across a stage only signify blossoming
Ignorance
To each other.
Keeping busy is a means
To ignorance,
A way of moving on
Before physically moving on.
Putting the other in danger
Is willed self-harm.
As in your sister, so in yourself.
She is underweight,
so are you.
She is imprisoned by her mind,
So, too, you.
There is no
Defining of
Self
through moral antagonism and
Imaginary distance;
Only through overlap
and intersection.
When you drank what you drank
To hurt yourselves as entertainment
You hurt all of us.
And reflected a hurt festering inside.
When you powwowed
To distance you from me, the other,
sold my private feelings to the highest bidder--the cult of Western psychiatric medicine--
you put the proverbial straight jacket on yourselves.
And after all the hurt this caused,
forgetting about compassion and that you knew me, you KNEW me,
the pow wow, now mine, is carefully watching you.
Must be tough to face
for self-professed winners and
elites.
I wonder, have you
lived through this?
wanting little more then authenticity,
loyalty, trust?
Getting instead betrayal, shallow understanding, tactlessness?
I know what they'll say, what you'll say, to deflect from feeling:
"Oh, victim, victim." And
"Oh, poor you."
But yes, poor me.
Maybe to a degree "poor you," as well;
We're all broken.
But for god's sake, and I mean it:
Poor me!
Perhaps this not knowing
is why you settled like
dust
into the crevices
of corners
of the old rickety house of my memory,
why I want you
to stay there and
never revive yourselves to me.
And money,
Wasnt it always about money?
What you assumed I didn't have,
You made sure to put me in my place for,
with breeding plurality
As though the ultimate sin
Were unplanned misfortune.
Everything I earned or won was shrugged off as drivel,
As was an entire lifetime of privelege
Many of you could only have hoped to live.
Because you were all bought and sold
on many levels
by image
masking deep insecurity;
I was, too.
To this day, none of you acknowledge any success or progress
In me, not
To my face.
I hope none of you experience it.
or
I hope you do;
I am not sure anymore.
And so,
Among the brightest,
also the dimmest.
Ironic
That we formed each other
In those fragile post-adolescent years
Set each other on our paths
unintentionally.
Tell me, from
whererever
you now see,
do you know the darkness?
Do you know the light?
………………
©erika haines 2014
