Insults on injuries
Nothing’s healed and you’re hurting too but stopping never happens
It’s all in the words, never raise a hand
Words shouldn’t hurt this much but on the 4th hour I’m exhausted and I just wish you would punch me
So I could get some sleep
I turn the other cheek
The pain you cause doesn’t go unnoticed
But pales
compared to what I must endure if you were to leave me with myself
It’s a need
for validation
I don’t need attention in that way
In the Marianna trench you eat what you get
Because you’ll start eating yourself
Desperation leaks into every time I let you touch me
Every time I bite my tongue and release the poison back unto myself
It is the most critical need for validation
Layered over a real alarm bell
warning me
That I need to please you so you stay
So your sorry excuse for love can remind me
I’m okay
Or else I will detonate myself
You crossed over to acidic contempt
Devaluation
Truly imaginative accusations
None of them swayed me
What’s this compared to how I speak to myself?
You can and you do test me
I think you think I’m crazy at this point
Who would stay and still keep fighting for this?
I searched
Never found the bottom of how low you’d have to go before there was something to be saved from
But you did it
Slowly and rapidly
Repeatedly
Accidentally, maybe
Sometimes terrifying in how
deliberately
Through big things Small things
Things so big
I didn’t know betrayal could contain such obscene dimensions
Fought your way down into a lost depth
- the baseline for how much hurt I could take
How many punches I would swallow
How many blows to everything that gave me a sense of self
No one’s ever hurt me like I hurt myself
But you. You took me with you on a journey
to inhabit what lies beyond the cruelest thing I could ever have lived with if my twisted mind could even go there
and it tried
In my darkest moments with cruel thoughts only I broke every bone in myself
Maybe that’s what’s been hurting each time I try to catch my breath
This, you won too
Dragged us both below a line I didn’t even realise you were so close to
And for that I thank you
In silence and in having only myself
for feedback
I braced for hatred, for the return of the relentless self-degradation
What abuse was I going to suffer now that you weren’t there to shield me from myself
While I waited
I held onto myself like I actually cared and wanted to protect her
Sit with the words I’d spoken to myself and try to repair her
Somewhere along this time
Across a few not-so-fixed lines
What brought me to my knees just sort of…
Sweeped me back
To myself
Into my arms
And something tells me that
In myself
I’ve found the love that’s been missing