Picture This:

Loud, pumping music floods the room, then BOOM-

There he stands. 

A heaving, deceiving, thieving black cloud of soot and emptiness follows him, 

With a face like a familiar tomb.

My tomb.

What could it be? Why is he approaching me?

Who could this burning human-being come to be?

Picture this:

My isolation thickens like dingy pond water

Desolation, desperation, separation

Where did the party go?

Blackness clouds the swamp that is my mind,

Sends frogs and flies leaping and buzzing away

Away to stay.

I try to hide inside but sometimes

My reality defies it.

Picture this:

His eyes on fire, approaching closer, closer towards me

No one around me knows it but

I am frozen,

Cold and stiff as a corpse as

He tries to hold me close but 

He also doesn't know me or where I have been hiding

because

I am gone.

I am down a sewer drain where there is nothing,

Nothing for me to explain. 

Is it pain? Am I sane? Should I run away in shame?

Picture this:

A million trembling fingers trace my skin like knives,

An unlicensed gun of silence between us pointed at my head

BOOM.

He spells out his wrongdoing like

An encyclopedia, yet never reads the very pages

He has written.

I’m still inside myself but he has 

Nothing to hide as he

Tries to climb inside me too.

He shines like an explosion and I am thrown astray

I cannot stay 

I cannot stay

I cannot stay but

I cannot run, nowhere to turn because

My brain is grey water, blurred, his words are slurred,

“Lets dance,” he spits lava but instead

I’d rather be dead.

Picture this:

The gavel hits hard mahogany as the jury

Plunges embers down my throat

I choke on smoke as they skim his twisted words and announce

“Not Guilty.”

My lungs fill with flames as they say 

What should've happened

What I saw

What he did 

Where I hid away.

In a whirlpool of regret I sit

“Should have gotten a rape kit”, they ooze

And I am flushed away again in 

Their spit.

Picture this:

This was all in my head

Her head

His head

Their heads 

OUR heads.

Do you believe that one bit?

Fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers

Cousins, family and lovers.

We are burned by the touch, the grab, the grope of 

Sexual assault.

But we are also

Setting fire to the waving white flags

Above our nation.

We’ve painted a pretty picture, re-read every letter.

Now we have to start again, and paint it better.