I’m off to an event today in the city, Out of the Shadows, to raise awareness on Domestic Violence. Brisbane Youth Services has kindly asked The Broken Records Collective to be a part of it. Unfortunately, Thomas will not be joining Scott and I because he had to fall off his bike and have a badly broken leg. Please, feel bad for him because he loves pity.
Most of my poetry collection is quite sunny and hopeful, but there are a few dark ones in there, so I will be sharing this piece on stage today:
She never believed that paper tree standing lonely in her yard,
stabbed its trunk for bleeding sap, but its skin was too hard.
It was hardened cement she drank playing hop scotch in her skirt,
her stitched up socks ripped playing jacks with rocks.
Tell her something her cousin didn’t when she was eight years old.
Or that carcass in the dog’s mouth – broken bones of a home she never owned,
that childhood she burned under a gravestone.
Ever ask her how her day was?
What her favorite color way?
She’d tell you it was purple.
Like a bruise before it fades,
like another shade of blue,
the hue of the sky at twilight when she sneaks to the roof,
etches her perception of life beyond the moon,
beyond the stars, beyond the broken bottles in the section eight school yard.
Blurs the edges to shade them just right.
Her sights set on the spaceship that’ll send her to the stars,
far, far away from here.
