Note: This poem was written as a spoken word piece. I recommend pressing play on the voiceover 🖤.
[TW: This poem references past sexual and emotional abuse. It features intense imagery, sex, kissing, orgasm sounds, swearing, and name-calling.]
Silence
That’s what it sounded like in my mind the moment I realized no one was coming.
The moment I learned that being seen is optional and most friends are in fact, spends, paying lifeforce with interest. Dangling the threat of rejection until even eye contact is a droplet in a scorched desert.
Maybe I had to see my bank account draw negative to finally realize my life isn’t a carnival ride and I’m not selling tickets. I keep overdrafting until my body grows sick and I start asking for permission to create.
But then I got angry. And loud.
Maybe that is why they didn’t want to hear it.
After all, my art is a scream wrapped in flowers I grew in a garden,
and Darling,
you don’t want to know that garden.
You actually don’t, and that’s okay. Maybe one day I will go back and do some weeding in it for you, but today it’s just a raw viny mess. It’s a lot even for me, and I’ve already seen the way eyes go glassy when I open the gate even just a little bit.
I broke
the moment they entered and fucked me like my curiosity, my INNOCENCE, was theirs to ignore. And at the time, I didn’t know what I gave away. Maybe they didn’t either. And could I fault them for that?
They put me on their jury. Like it was my civic duty to witness their testimony and I—
I didn’t know rage until that day.
It comes and goes since then. A glimpse slipping through clenched teeth and tears on an idle afternoon between shows. I didn’t want to feel. Numb me Netflix. Numb me right here. Take it away. Please. I beg you. Bring me back my innocence when I watched horrific shit on reruns but could hit pause so I could breathe.
No. NO. Turn off the TV. Smash it. I don’t want to live other people’s lives anymore!
I want to embrace artistry, not fantasy.
I want to know my desires. That I don’t fuck to lose my pain but to remind myself that
I will survive after all. I will be free.
No more hesitation.
Because somewhere along the way I lost the distinction between sacrifice and spiritual slavery. The way my mind was trained to offer credit before I even learned accounting.
My kinks are the story of my trauma, the way I beg and control, filling what was lost. Seeking transformation. I used to fuck for fun but now it’s to remind me that life is fucking alive and what better way to celebrate a life than by fucking?
Maybe it’s still fun a little bit. But it’s fun like free soloing El Capitan. Don’t slip and definitely don’t look down.
So, knowing all that, would you let me slowly undress you? Would you let me show you how we, together, find justice?
I’d like to gather all the ways they called me names, dismissed my feelings, called me slow, and pour that transmuted tension into your ears like thick honey, made drop by agonizing drop, bees buzzing in my mess of a garden; until we fuck with abandon at the brink of shared madness. I will spread my throbbing pain as sweetness on your lips, and teach you what it feels like when someone completely devotes their body entirely to you.
I planted lavender a while back, I’ll rub my hands with it before I trace you.
Too many nights I end up on the floor beside my bed, bruised knees, praying “please, I can’t hold it. It’s too much. I didn’t ask for this, did I?” A deep part of my soul knows I did, I can’t even escape myself. Fuck—it would be so much easier to just be a victim, wouldn’t it?
Would it?
Am I going to lay down and cry while we talk about color and gender and who got up more times in the night bruised and battered when the baby was crying and it took everything to learn how to create through sleepless nights of pain and shame? Maybe mine doesn’t hold a candle to your life. But I would still light my candle next to yours on the altar, if you would have me.
Maybe it’s enough just to say “I see you.” I don’t know you but I see you. Not because I understand what you went through but because I understand what I did, and I wouldn’t wish any of it on the children we were. I know we can both agree that they deserved better.
We stop waiting for the powers that be to see our children and we write and speak about how good pain feels. We admire each other’s expression so we don’t have to go back begging for them to look us in the eyes, one more time.
So maybe that’s why
when we fuck it’s electric.
Maybe your vibrating walls are, in fact, the halls of justice and I will articulate kisses along your arched spine before I gesticulate my case inside
your honor?
May I approach the bench? I’d like to lick my arguments into you until you gasp-moan my sentencing.
I strip the evidence of our mutual sorrow away and slide my conclusions deep.
But, darling angel babe, don’t laugh. Or maybe do because I’d rather laugh and cum than puke from rage into a toilet at 3:33am–wondering why they didn’t do something,
anything,
when all the evidence was so obvious they could have choked on it.
Maybe, choke on me instead.
Deep throat your grief-laden ecstasy on that thick hardness and don’t you worry, we’ll untrain that gag reflex.
Because you already know what death feels like, don’t you?
You saw it in their eyes.
They killed you that day too, and not in a graveyard dark romantic sort of way. But only in the way it could have hurt most. By showing you that everything you feared was true.
And let me tell you, my needy slut, they were right.
Which is why we should fuck until we are sloppy and full and pregnant with a new idea of what life is.
On the count of three we all cum together. No hesitation. No question, I already know you’re warmed up like I am. Cum for every single time we’ve felt the putrid rage of injustice. Cum for the right to say “FUCK YOU MY BODY IS MINE AND YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.”
THREE. TWO. ONE.
YES.
Say yes to ALL of it.
…
Here. Now. This is the hallowed moment where you decide to write a new verdict of your life.
Not to give it away but to demand of yourself
humbly (because you are God and you deserve respect)
for spiritual slavery to END.
ENOUGH.
FREE YOURSELF.
It was never up to them anyway.
Let’s write and paint and sing and dance and dress slutty to fuck ourselves into life again. Where they don’t deserve us anymore. Where we all drag our demons into the light and forgive ourselves and lick our wounds like savoring the last seeds of a pomegranate, left here by an ancient lie.
I’ll let the devil inside me tongue the devil inside you and together we will litigate the pain until it is nothing but dust.
We will reach for Divinity with our bodies intertwined.
And we will be reminded
That justice IS ours. We decide what justice we deserve. They cannot take it away. Not in here. Not in this holy ground where I lay myself bare before you ready to die yet again for the right to say how fucking gorgeous I think you are.
You did not see the years of bone etching heartbreak that it took
for me to finally say
I love you
Unconditionally. Without attachment.
To have faith instead of fear.
I know you aren’t my savior. Perhaps that’s where I made my own mistakes. I grasped when I should have let go, and I let go when I should have held on a bit tighter, and for that I deeply apologize. I didn’t know, and I also know that’s not an excuse. I will let my terror finally burn away so I can finally see
your scars.
I will clean them with my tears and my tongue.
This is the reason why I bring my lessons into our sweat soaked sheets.
Ready to show you my apologies through the way I really, truly, take my time with you. The way I check in and make sure you’re still here with me, that I didn’t lose you to a dark reminder in that liminal space. That the only kind of slavery here is the kind you put on for an afternoon while I whisper what a brat you’ve been.
That this time, with your consent of course, we could negotiate the edge. I could scare you safely into living again. Reminding you that even though I could dip you into the riptide currents of the River Styx, I would never ever let you go completely. You’re too important to me, my deepest love. I’m too important to me to do that to you.
I will hold you while you scream in rage the names of all who wronged you. I hold tightly because I already know their eyes, even if the names I would say are different.
And one day, maybe, you will scream my name with rage. And I yours. And we will realize that we gave each other something we didn’t mean to give, and we will blame each other and rally our armies and rampage across civilization like Ghengis Khan. Remake it all. Make them see. THEY WILL KNOW WHAT THAT DIPSHIT DID TO ME. They ignored my pleas. They dared to tell me they couldn’t hold my suffering anymore, while they sank to the edge of death themselves.
But, my journey is mine and yours is yours, and that’s the way of it. We found redemption in each other, and the river keeps flowing. Currents split apart. I’m sorry, love. We hate and ache for how much we loved, and the truth is we were only angry because we couldn’t fill it up beyond what that container could hold, in the end.
The relationship was supposed to die, beloved.
The day we finally had to come back to ourselves.
One day I will find the truth of me and you will find the truth of you and we will embrace like long lost lovers again.
Naked. Dancing. Covered in ash.
Wasn’t that wild, what we went through?
I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.
Thank you for teaching me how to live free.
Then, and only then—will we break open the light of creation itself
And we will remake civilization
with Erotic Justice.
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Evan Isaac is the voice of Orcus Auditory — spoken word, story, and intimate audio, written and recorded live, for people who listen close.
