Citazione della settimana – “Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across” di Mary Lambert

How I Learned to Love   

 

When I was fifteen, I hated everything except for Weezer 

and maybe like two people. And cereal. 

One time a boy grabbed me in the music room 

and kissed my neck in front of everybody. 

I did not want to be kissed, but I thought I was supposed 

to want to be kissed. I did not know what to do. 

And so I laughed. 

I knew you were supposed to laugh after things like that 

The world had taught me to dress up my trauma 

in short skirts and secret bathroom crying, 

to protect the fragility of boys at all costs   

 

When I was five, my father molested me 

you become a strange human that way 

You cannot whip yourself awake as a child 

I should have been born a bird   

 

When I turned six, 

I stopped talking.   

 

When I was twenty-five and my name was on the radio, 

I asked people to write poems and send them to me 

Maybe because I was starved of honest humanity 

Half of the poems were about slit wrists   

 

I do not want to know any more 

about this brand of humanity. 

All I know of love is hunger.   

 

When I met you,  I planted my heart into the heavy 

earth. I was scared, 

But you smiled back. 

Thank God I was not born a bird.