ameliorate

Daniel is all I could call you.
Dad stuck in my throat
with my glued peanut butter tounge

always sounding false.
Forced.
Little whispers followed me;
I grew up,
day by day.
I knew bitter nightmare truths that never

showed their face with the cold light of day.
Devil red hair
& murderous hands
with an arsons punch,

I watched,
you beat my mother.
From under the stairs
between the wooden planks.
I can still see you blured

with your anger and my tears
that became the river,
where fish
are diseased with
tumerous growths.

Where damns hold the water,
bacteria grows.
From the jagged rock banks

I sat, watching
men pull sturgen
from the blackness towards the light.
Sick but heavy still with life.

Golum eyes &
bottomfeeder mouths.
They visit me in the night,
flopping, drowning in air
before billyclub death
is introduced with a thud.

"Don't worry," I heard my granmother say
"she is too little she won't remember."
Four years old,
eating cookies in gram's lysol clean kitchen
hearing my mothers sobs echo'd
on hardwood floors.

I can still see her clear
in the dust and sun
golden strawberry blonde hair
a white linen top,
cutoff jean shorts.
Standing tear-stained next to
a beatup leather suitcase;
hitchhiking towards slavation.

~