LOVER

Why I Didn't Report

1. I was a homeless teen, escaping a violent & abusive home
2. Not one adult cared about me
3. I was so devastated by my reality that I almost died
4. Nobody cared what happened to me or any girls

My sexual assault, rape and abuse lasted years. The body that endures that has been taught to believe it doesn't matter - I'm not me, I'm an IT. That's the nature of abuse. The very reason why it took decades to be able to tell my story is a byproduct of abuse, and it's why abusers do what they do: power.

They had (took) it, I had none (objects have no power).

All of it - trauma, assault, sexual abuse & harassment, discrimination, oppression, repression - is an expression of the ruling psychology of this land: power is all, power is a (white) man's (by men I mean men, and also all abusers, cuz you don't need a penis to perform patriarchial power hierarchies, which my own mother proved).

Their conception/performance of power is just a construction, though - a thought a man had in his head that he does everything he can - desperately - to convince us is "true", to assert it and distract us from its inherent flimsiness. Bombs, they throw bombs. That's what rape is - a bomb designed to destroy my power, to keep them in power. 

(p.s, guys, you don't have to be a rapist to benefit from rape culture, to be complicit, and to perpetuate it in overt and covert ways. Micro-aggressions, silence, refusing to engage, refusing to take responsibility, refusing to listen, refusing to honor, refusing to call your brothers out, any action that reinstates you always to a position of power ... it's endless, the ways men assert dominance/privilege. It's a flood, it's killing the world ... 

We deconstruct their systems of abuse and toxic power when we assert our agency and express and claim our intrinsic truth - that we are. WE ARE. I AM, in my totality, utterly and perfectly true.

Of course I didn't report. If that would've even been an option, the power structure that made a man believe he was entitled to act his fantasies of power out via me/my body wouldn't exist in the first place. If this were a world where "reporting" were easy & possible, it would be a completely different world, "reporting" would hardly be necessary.

Besides, why do the people who rape and oppress women/etc get to decide what "reporting" should look like? That's madness, and nifty for them.

No matter when or where or how or why or to who we tell it, any and all tellings ARE REPORTING. My embodied, lived experience IS REPORTING. Reporting by their criteria is NOTHING - reporting by ours is ALL

#truthtopower #deconstruct #patriarchykills #whyididntreport #believesurvivors #believeeachother #speakyourtruth#iamamiracle #metoo#ibelievechristineblaseyford #butofcourse #metoo #metoomvmt #survivor#imasurvivor

Before you have a tantrum, Brenda

Spellcaster

And we will open the vein, hold our truth, speak our truths, heal our wounds, alter the current, evolve the energy, the language, hope

O my heart

be still, my heart

 Tom Waits sings the soul

HER KIND

Anne Sexton, 1928 - 1974

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

going with the flow

"We Cast Spells" photo EUnderwood

Legit stop

"Directions" photo EUnderwood

Checklist/Bulletin

1. That my inexplicable was explicable
2. Was not a tempting velodrome
3. Maybe blossoms
4. All doors open to the believer
5. My body had no sense
6. In the end it was Murakami 
7. Absolute joy, a place with no beginning
8. So about those angels in Wings Of Desire
9. On the rim of an undisturbed blankness
10. Blossoms covering the dead where they lie
11. A pale shadow
12. Bathed in florescent light
13. Shadow, chasing after
14. You been fortunate
15. The opportunity to photograph
16. The spinning trajectory 
17. Stared at the heavy white coffee mug
18. Hay for the horses 
19. I gave an apple to a pony 
20. Don't doubt for one second
21. The power to heal
22. Lying in snow
23. Down rocky paths
24. Abandoned black barn
25. To shed, share, deliver
26. Wishing well
27. Frida Kahlo's bed
28. Jean Genet's grave, Larache
29. Desert tracks, Namibia
30. Arcade Bar, Detroit
31. Berlin
32. Comic mask
33. Degrees

There must be a thousand and one ways to find it

"And Personal" photo ©EUnderwood

The logic of forgetting abuse

memory's secret places singing/time

for new songs -

 

I killed something accidentally, she

killed on purpose -

the body keeps the score. The strength

 

and endurance to respond 

to extraordinary conditions/I know. This

I get from crows:

 

Ignus aurum probat -

fire tests gold, and adversity

tests the brave.

What I needed most

 

was to know what it would be like to be

in a family - simply knowing

they'd be there 

no matter what. Unconditional

love - love

without condition. So it could be hot

or cold, silver/gold, tears

or rocks or something

liminal, sand constantly

shifting under your feet, or hard

slate and quartz - something

climate-free or atomic happening, and family

would open the door. How would I know? Can't miss

what you never had/no use 

 

crying, nobody

gets everything/nothing

is promised

in this life. Here

 

is where the hand of fate

once again completes the night, the roots

of resilience are found  

where the body shapes itself into spirit and

abundance is in the net  

of what I do not have.