fragility

in conversation with someone
comfortable, she is able to
show her true colors, still
each eye bears an iris full of
years of torment & the therapy that
followed---
these very same eyes
like little cameras buried in her young
innocent face,
which had been pushed to the wall
as a little girl & forced to do things
that she blocked out then
but which soon grew so loud
they screamed inside her head
enough to blow her eardrums out
from within,
recording hundreds, thousands of
execrable images that
flooded the levees &
bore terrors down upon her very heart
that tried to survive amidst the
self-hatred that resulted,
pulling with it an undeserved feeling
that she would never be clean again,
that no one would ever love her.

struggling with “trust” is an
understatement, for what’s been done has
been done & even though people insist
that she’s attractive, she has
fought the urge to make herself throw
up, fought the urge to binge, fought the
urge to slice at herself---all attempts
to quench the destructive impulse that
no one else can understand,
pulsating inside
&
every day her strength increases is
every day she wins the fight against
herself, in complete paradox.