Trauma

A shadow crept in daylight's doubt to take my words away,

Folding secrets into hems of cotton, day by day.

The cruiser lights were staccato bursts that fractured through the room,

I loved the man they took away, he was gone far too soon.

The empty chair at dinner time grew teeth and learned to gnaw,

While I was left in silence to navigate the world.

The hands that came in later years found a but a little girl.

With pigtails pulled too tightly and a spirit worn and weak.

They smoothed the floral dresses down as if to hide the stain,

While I became a master at the alchemy of pain.

I locked the doors of every room inside my shaking chest,

And wore the shame like heavy stones beneath a Sunday best.

I grew in height but stayed a ghost, a hollow, polished shell,

Building a careful heaven 'round a private, burning hell.

I never told the neighbors, and I never told the sky,

I let the quiet swallow every "when" and "how" and "why."

But ghosts don't sleep forever in the closets of the mind,

They wait for us to turn around and see what’s left behind.

Now the threads are fraying, and the seams are bursting wide,

There is no room for monsters or the little girl who died.

The dress is too small now, and the pigtails have been shorn,

It's time to face the wreckage and the parts of me so torn.

The shadow kept my words so long, it thought they were its own,

But I am claiming back the seeds that silence should never have sown.