I’m an artist. Being an artist is my salvation. I decided on that path when I was 7 years old. It allowed me to escape when my sisters were screaming, and pleading “Daddy please stop! Please stop.” When it wasn’t me that time. There was only once when he broke into that secret world and raging he threw a scissors at me. It stuck me in my face. My early marriage was supposed to save me. My young husband was my white knight. Instead he married me to save him – I just never knew what I was supposed to save him from. So I buried myself in my own little world of art and poetry and my children. And I didn’t dare ask myself if I was happy.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Ten years post divorce and still
He trolls my dreams,
nearly breaking me again, time after time.

At dawn of day the insufferable questions arouse,
not always abiding my attempts
to push them away.

Questions chiseled deep within my heart,
the ones that are the residue
from nearly forty years of gas-lighting

when the questioner is made to feel crazy
by the one who hides the truth.
He molds your psyche like putty in his hands.

He fools you into believing that was love
rather than the gay-lighting it really was.

He squeezed all the life out of that lump of clay
then tossed it aside to wither and die
along the way,
without the answers he secretly hoards.




1 comment:

  1. What a beautiful and moving poem, Maureen. It really captures the pain left behind. xoxoxoxo

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