Poem: A Broken Cycle Complete

[jakebe]

Not very happy, but you know the type.


A Broken Cycle Complete

The broken child
screams a thousand angry red lines
on lined white paper.
She bleeds for her mother.
Twelve years old
in seventh grade
and the blindness of age
already covers her like the affectations
of an unwanted uncle
covering the bright blindness of childhood.
We're all blind, in some respect.
She's mistaken new blinders
for new eyes.

Seventeen.
A senior who has no flowers,
she says she ain't going to the prom.
She wears big and clunky black boots
and dyed black hair
with matching fingernails and lipstick.
She says she's rebelling
against duty
and social stagnancy
and the President
and bubble gum.
She wants her eyes to be dark
not ever really knowing
they are already.

The broken woman
bleeds red streams on the carpet
screaming in the name of God
but actually
she bleeds for her daughter.
Twenty-seven years old,
a master's degree in literature,
a librarian's assistant.
She's up on stage
trying to communicate the view
from inside her eyelids
and she's gonna put blinders on her baby
and everything's gonna be OK.
She's gonna put blinders on her baby
and then she'll call it love.