Care Taker
Some people just weren’t meant to exist.
There are no words in any of the languages of man
To express the betrayal of a mother
Who willfully brings harm to her own child,
Who stands at the threshold of a path
Down which she drags her victim
Kicking and screaming.
The souls drained from children
Sustain her deadened being
Like a lich cheating death.
It must damage someone
Irreparably, completely,
To blacken hearts and deaden eyes.
But the abused, abetted by their headsman,
Create their own reality
To escape from the idea
That they can’t trust anyone anymore,
That hopelessness has become the norm,
That this is how you’re meant to be treated,
And so they save themselves
Without surviving.
What would prompt someone to
Rob and vandalize a house,
Kidnap a little girl,
Marry a man with financial stability
Then stop taking birth control
As she did once before
In order to entrap him
Like a spider on a bejeweled web,
Then have children
At an interval so precise
That each is born with just enough time between them
That the youngest needs constant care?
What would prompt someone to
Keep nude media
Of her own infant child
And then lie to the oh-too-blind face of justice
To try to pin the blame on someone else?
If I were a betting man,
(And I’m not, because all bets are off)
I would say that it would be the sort of person
Who enjoys being a big fish in a little pond,
Who wants to seem intelligent,
Who is destined to a life searching for answers that don’t exist,
And who fools everyone, even herself,
To believe she’s a victim.
The sort of person
Who has nothing
Because they are nothing,
And so they drag their offspring to ruin
So that they become nothing too.
