The Bride Wore White
I lie naked on the bed beside the sweating hulk of blubber I call spouse.
A fucking machine by seventeen, I’ve served little other purpose then or since.
It secured me a husband and a brood of stinking brats that are my prison.
Little else.
If the taste of stale semen doesn’t suit you, don’t indulge it as a youth.
Be it proffered - or conceded - in the heat of throwing caution to the wind
(as is our wont)
it’s all too easy to discover, decades later, it’s a flavour you revile.
But dare not puke.
The fist insists.
It isn’t bruising of the body that entails the greatest insult.
Bruising heals.
But the image in the mirror every morning is distorted all the same.
Its reflection mocks the entity your instinct wants to say you might become
if not for bruising.
But the bruising eats integrity like cancer eats the body: inside out.
And, like cancer, by the time you know you’ve got it, it’s too late to thwart the beast.
Though a lucky few prevail despite its call.
It’s not the cancer that offends
so much as knowing you’re an ally in its cause -
yet too unwell to abandon the proclivities it savours and exploits.
A pathetic few discover this in time.
But not in time to stop its bruising.
I’m a victim.
What does that mean?
That a world that beats and bruises didn’t miss me in its juggernaut of pain?
Like my family before me, I am not the one responsible for who and what I am
(or might become)
but, so long as I’ve intelligence, accountable for everything I do.
The cycle mocks me.
Did my children ask their dad and me to fuck?
They’re victims too.
So fucking what?