Here I will post poems, occasionally.
These will be experiments with forms and ideas or just goes at trying to shape to my thoughts. They may be finished or works in progress.
First one:
Within reason
'You used to insist we never tell your son,'
said the firm in their letter to her.
They had worked with her during
her most tortured years of trying
to sell her painting of the horse.
Now, they found her suggestion,
after her bankruptcy, that
I disapproved of them for
making a claim against her,
ironic. In truth, I wasn't
to see the letter till after her death.
Others had by then revealed
that they had been told not to discuss
her 'business' with me
because I wasn't to be trusted.
Meanwhile, she had told me not to tell
anyone about her 'business'
because I might wreck the deal.
And if I disobeyed, I would get
nothing. Nice.
How the abuser cuts the victim off
from sources of advice and
support. From the trustees,
for example. There are other
things the abuser favours,
the gaslighting. Predicting your
questions and feeding information
that makes you doubt your
reason. Undermines your confidence
in yourself. She couldn't stop
herself: it was the way she thought;
they were the tricks she traded with.
Destroying herself, her family.
She couldn't it seems, care less.
I wonder if she could. I
cannot imagine she couldn't.
Perhaps such questions
are the wrong ones entirely.
How can one ever account for
such behaviour, such cruelty?
Better to say she was ill?
The doctor told me she had a
delusional disorder at the end of
her life. Better to answer unreason
with reason? But memory
has its story, reminding
me that what she did felt
too structured, too intended.
Manipulation - suppression of just the
right fact to confuse and cause
suffering - had integrity. Inflicting
pain on people seemed a moral imperative.
Abuses wired in by someone unknown.
Taught, learnt well. Within reason.
Leaving us to make sense of it all,
that others might be free of such traps.
