This is a prose-poem
THE COLOUR OF MY GRIEF IS RED
I left the redness of the womb wanting to scream.
I soon learnt
As my mum turn out
All lights, turn her back firmly on me, shut all door.
To only darkness inside a silence.
I squeeze my eyes so tight
Blocking my throat, sending sickness into my stomach.
Squeeze tight I see red again.
I grow, used to no tears.
I cut myself.
Red fantasised me
Watching it, putting fingers in it, drinking it.
Somehow it reminded I was alive
As I so wanted to die.
I saw, was shown pictures that sent death into my guts.
Pictures named porn by my detached soul.
Pictures where red is all I knew
Red at the ripping apart of bodies, red at their silent screaming.
Red being clean away from the image but always there
In my nightmares.
I was told it was what sex was
It was fun, it is rather just fantasy
Everyone does it.
I saw red as I wanted to look away, only to stare more and more.
I could not move, I could not breathe.
I had forgotten that I was breathing.
Later laying dead in bed
Images of women, children getting pokes, mouths fill of stuff, dead eyes
Seeing pain that can’t be, but is everywhere.
I see it replayed on my ceiling – seeing my body poked, stuffed, pushed around
Surrounded by red.
I don’t cry.
Years later, I am that porn image.
I am being poked in every hole in my body
Including I didn’t know I had
Holes nowhere big enough to get poked.
It goes red.
I pushed into positions from those pictures
From pictures going back from Grecian vases to gonzo sex.
No natural position, just position to send extreme pain, extreme terror.
Red is all I can know
I cannot cry, I cannot scream, I cannot say no, I cannot complain.
Red is all I can know,
By Christ
It all that is left for me.
I am now what they call the whore
The prostitute
As I stuffed fill of their hate, their fear, their contempt, their rage
As I am raped to almost dead
Beaten as a game
I told in stories with no end of how to murder a whore.
I have nothing left but
Seeing red.
I am inside a role
That makes no sense
A role
That poisons my skin
A role
Where I have no say, no rights.
I struck inside this moment
Seeing red
Forgetting how, why I got here.
I am just the whore
The living porn-toy.
I cannot know I have a life
Outside this moment
That is dangerous.
All I know is
Red.
