The Performance

Enigmatic
Melodramatic
She strides across the stage
Her stage is her room
The room is the stage

Her chamber
Peppered with papers
Unused
Running around her room
Screaming, fists pounding in her head
Teeth grating in her skull

Hissing:
'He's a monster.'
Onlookers stare so hard
Their eyeballs
Are in danger of dropping out
They are assessing her
Flipping through
Her verbal photograph album

How far did he really go?
Did she exaggerate her childhood traumas
Simply to justify her neuroses?
Did she force the razor deeper into her bones
Was she ever really there?
Or did she manufacture her own past
Making significance out of superficiality

She tells the audience
that she remembers
One minute
She could be
laughing carefree
down by the beach
The next
She is in the midst
Of civil war

Father is the enemy
Mother urging her to
Absent herself
Words captured in shrieks
Let the onlookers in

Listen to Mother, he whispered softly
I inserted myself between them
My that only made him hit her harder
Nobody heard, nobody heard
And yet we live in a ground floor flat
I tried to tug her hand
But she wouldn't come, she wouldn't come
What was wrong with you mother,
Did you enjoy it?

defenseless now
As she was then
But the onlookers see
A fledgling psychopath
Well versed in adversaries psychiatry

In they march
with all the subtlety
of an invading and marauding army