The Abuser's Lament
A trigger warning.
I want to talk to you, Kevin / Mr Wong,
but I can't.
And not for want of haunting:
in some extreme cases, you'd probably have to immediately report a crime
(and I know you would, because that is just who you are)
and in others,
well.
I would die inside,
if you knew not just of how I was abused,
but what I perpetuated
because I was overrun and used,
and kept telling myself that it was alright.
What horrible news
you would have to face about me.
Kev / Mr Wong, you say you love and respect
all humanity:
I will be the one
to break such principled Kevin / Mr Wong vanity.
After all, you already pretend so well, Kevin / Mr Wong
to not be angry
at all the things they did to you.
How do I live, knowing
that if you knew,
you would undoubtedly have no choice but to put me
into the same group?
Like you, Kev / Mr Wong, always say,
and I believe you:
you might be the Makaravedra,
but you are not and will never be gay Eurasian space Jesus.
So how can I be prepared to lose
everything, if I break free
of the abuse
that slithers through my body
and my past? Sometimes my present —
oh, the things I do
to others, and to myself.
It is not just your approval, Kev / Mr Wong,
but my own.
The guilt and shame would tear me apart
if I ever let what I did be known
to myself.
So I do this instead
and gently nurse myself back to health
as my sanity cracks and dismantles itself every day. As I tell myself
I am someone else.
Not just that I am not gay,
or in some terrible cases
a pedophile:
I tell myself that it's all okay.
That I, and my doomed, endlessly perpetuating fate, have already consigned myself
to hell.
And every time you write these poems, Kev / Mr Wong,
it all rings ever louder and louder in my weeping, soulless heart.
The empty clanging
of someone else's own mindless, tideless bell.
The sound of the ocean crashing against my walls, and receding, and dying;
a sound, a story, a whited-out, blanketed fury
that even for a poem so inviting,
ask, or don't ask.
I will never, ever tell.