Sleeping through the thunderstorm
Every word is aimed at me.
Each one a tiny poison dart
Piercing my fragile armour,
Breaking through defences
That took so long to build.
They fall so easily,
Like my hopes
Names shouldn’t hurt like this,
Sticks and stones and all that shit
They do hurt.
They make me want to cry
But I can’t
I’m supposed to be a big boy now.
I want to be five again.
Wrapped up in my quilted fortress
Warm,
Protected,
Safe.
Sleeping through the thunderstorm.
Malcolm McLachlan – Aged 12 – 1965 – Never Submitted
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This entry was posted on October 17, 2010 at 12:15 and is filed under Bullying, Poetry, School, Tears with tags Mental Archaeology, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 17, 2010 at 15:57
It’s a tough place, stuck somewhere between childhood and crying and the knowledge there should be something else – but what?
Thanks for sharing.
Love
Daniel
October 27, 2010 at 10:01
And it gets worse when you realize that the “quilted fortress” really is a tomb.
“The hardest thing in this life is to live it. Be brave. Live.” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ep. 100)
What do you do if nobody taught you the strength how to do that?
October 27, 2010 at 10:14
I think that you do what I did, descend into depression and continue to be bullied and abused. Sometimes it was just easier not to fight back, to retreat into tears and isolation.
You hit the target dead centre, I didn’t have anybody to teach me how to cope.
October 17, 2010 at 16:14
You’re right, Daniel, it’s a tougher place than a lot of people realise especially for children contending with serious problems.
Love
Malcolm
October 28, 2010 at 08:22
You wrote that when you were 12? Wow. Pain, too, taught me to see and and to speak, because otherwise I would have choked to death on unspilt tears, but with 12 my formost form of expression was hitting peeps. I’d barely begun to seriously read by then…
October 28, 2010 at 08:51
It’s probably a good thing that I had a “voice”, being small for my age and badly underweight, I’d have got the crap beaten out of me. I got beaten up a fair bit anyway and then got beaten at home every time, my parents didn’t believe in violence for any reason unless they were inflicting it as punishment.