Feels Blind

The first thing I remember was the hunger.
Waking up and thinking is this natural? -
the way you fit your hands round my waist
and hold me like a doll, or toxic waste
from a post-nuclear family. - At arm's length.

You said the greed was my fault,
something to do with the biological seed
of what makes me woman. Makes me wrong.

I was told I don't belong here.
I was out of my depth, treading water
with all the other daughters who dared
to speak before they were spoken to;
those who woke and refused
to have the words choked out of them.

You said I was ugly, held down and half-drowned.
That I look best behind glass, or better still, beneath it.
Blow off the dust and learn to trust us, you said.

You tried to give me a new face, subservience,
but I couldn't fake it, couldn't take it - the silence
that lay behind. The binding of all those thou shalt knots.
You taught me my boundaries, gave me a baptism
in your fiction - made me the eve time forgot.


I watched your red tide rise before you pulled me under.
I told you this feels blind. Your words burned
like a lighthouse, guiding in the night:
Out of sight, out of mind.

* * *

With the last couple of poems, I wanted to take a break from all the narcissistic personal stuff I've been writing recently. So here we go, something more explicitly political than I've written in ages.

As always, the formatting's all out of whack, so please view this on my dA page for the proper version.


Inspired by the Bikini Kill song Feels Blind and, less obviously, I:Scintilla's Cursive Eve (although a lot of the original references to that were cut in the redraft). I'd really recommend listening to Feels Blind to fully understand where I'm coming from with this. It's also an epic song, so you're missing out if you haven't already heard it. (: