ME TOO: Poem for a Monster

1 November 2k18

“That is not how to Love me.” ~ Fever Ray [Karin Dreijer]

Me Too.
By now that statement is enough to inform you that I have been sexually assaulted, harassed, violated…You know this from those two words due to the immense courage of women from every walk of life. Women, nay Humans, who have stood and added their voices to the clarion chorus of Survivors. Humans who are calling for an end to the grotesque culture of abuse and rape in our society.
Though it matters not, my gender is male (mostly). I am the 1 in 20.
Male Survivors, I beg you, join your Sisters. Raise your voices against the Monsters.

We accept atrocities.
They have become so ingrained, so prevalent, that as a society we add it to the statistics of annual horrors in apparent apathy.
Statistics that are tracked and charted: they grab, they grope, they nestle next to the unspeakable as if we cannot change.
Yet, we can.
WE can change this sick paradigm.
We can drag it into the light. We can watch it burn.
Individuals know how to change. Often, we just collectively don’t know how to stoke an ember into a conflagration.

Me Too is a collective social outcry.
It is the thunder that incites lightning.
I pray it cracks the world.

★

Feast for a Monster

Oh, how you must feast.
Gorging on a memory banquet—
my child hands on your flesh: unwilling.

Suck marrow from husks of vile memory
the way you sucked your lips then:
all venom and petulance.

Torpid. Sprawled on a ratty couch.
Warning me, “Don’t you dare throw up.”
—just as I see you in nightmares:

Massive and fearful
the way only a child
could remember.

Lick hoarded reminiscence
from your fingers,
Monster.

Let it drip down your elbows:
wring, throttle, squeeze
those final drops
out of the places
you ripped open
inside of me.

Scars grow upon scars.
Such wounds never heal clean.
You shall never know that
healing
has served to make me formidable.

Yet, you own nothing of my survival.
For that emerged from within,
where your maggot fingers
could not dig deep to reach.

Whilst you grow evermore frail
I banish you to the Past.
A predator become vulnerable:
choke now on your last sustenance
of corpse-liquor remembrance.

Monster,
how will you possibly
crave anything wholesome again
when you have supped at such a table?

★

DC McKenzie

::End Transmission::

November | Categories: Poetry by DC McKenzie | Tags: depression, grief, human rights, Life, Me Too, Monster, NOmeansNO, poetry, recovery, survivor | Leave a comment