Child’s Play

Who among you will have me?

Friend, will you receive this punching fist?

Colleague, will you meet all these demands?

Child, will you wear these insults?

Husband, will you soak up all these tears?

Who among you will take this piece from me?

Take this part of me that lashes and cuts?

I hold this piece away from me,

this child part that wants to kill a man.

I lock it in a dark brown room

where it drags sticks along the floor

and lights another fire in my chest.

It smears the walls with faeces,

and slices rows into my skin.

It laughs when people gag and turn in horror.

Who among you will help this child

who hates because it was hated,

who snatches all the cards I need

then rips them up with glee?

Who can love a thing made in the heat of incest?

I take it to my therapist,

he wears his softest smile,

he praises it and gives it space

but even he can’t tame it.

It waits and waits, it asks and asks

until it drains him of his patience.

Eventually his voice grows

brisk then he gives up.

Even he can’t win the game

of torture that it loves to play.

Find me someone who can love

this thing that’s terrified of love.

Find me someone it can kill.

Until then it takes a piece of me each day,

I let it play this way because my debt is huge.

It let me sleep each time he came,

it sacrificed itself to endless vile acts

and never told a soul.

It was his prisoner and plaything

so until I die I will be its toy.

“Dissociative parts of a person that are stuck in anger may experience this feeling as vehement and overwhelming, often without words…they imitate those who hurt them in the past and they can be experienced internally as the actual perpetrator(s)…they live in trauma time…part of an internal re-enactment of the traumatic past that endlessly loops.” – Onno Van Der Hart

References Boon, S. Steele, K. & Van Der Hart, O. (2011). Coping with Trauma Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists. London: W.W. Norton & Company.