Spoken Word, Topic 2: Abuse

LOVE LANGUAGE

I am the daughter

of a mother against drunk driving - 

MADD, she's mad crazy

because she calls me her angel,

even though I sit here in a wheel chair,

wingless and bound to the bruised face

of this earth;

my white dress smeared with tire marks,

my halo cracked,

like the pipe he smoked 

before he crossed the center line

and plowed into my side.

If I was fluent in the language of love,

I would keep talking about my mother,

but instead I wrote a poem about him - 

that devil in the blue Dodge

who wrecked my life.

He was high on anger,

drunk from every toxic memory

of an alcoholic father

who used his fists

to paint bloody portraits of hate

onto the canvas of a wife

who gritted her teeth while he shaped her body

into another domestic masterpiece.

She couldn't stand the stare of her son

who saw only hate,

so she hid her swollen face

like she did years ago behind a veil of wedding lace,

when she exchanged freedom for a diamond,

leftovers from breakfast at Tiffany's,

the first meal she cooked for a husband

who tricked her into believing 

his curses were slang for love.

Still, she never took that ring off,

she was proud of the love it was supposed to showcase.

But her son stopped looking for signs

of love in the house,

instead he locked himself in his room,

spent all day before a mirror,

pointing his father's gun

at his own reflection.

He wanted to blow his brains off

because he couldn't stop thinking

about the warped love of his family.

He was like his father,

art was his escape,

he painted with red cans,

sprayed his pain onto the walls of his room,

huffed the poisonous fumes

until he found peace in the mural of his life.

The door to his blood-stained room

was the gateway to a cold, hallucinatory world,

where meth was just one method

for confusing ideas like love and hate.

I hate love, he said

to everyone who tried to touch his heart,

the organ he swore was his most private part.

Every ounce of life that flowed through his punctured veins

froze with each hit of ice he took,

and he hit that ice,

froze every highway to hell,

where drivers high and drunk

on every substance but love

wreck lives like mine.

They say love is blind,

so I ask you to use the language of love

in everyday conversation

so that love does not also become deaf and mute,

does not become confined to a wheel chair,

crippled within you.

Let love drown the sounds of abuse:

substance abuse,

domestic abuse,

verbal abuse,

sexual abuse,

child abuse,

every kind of abuse that kills

people like me and you.