Shred

You are my life, my completeness.

This love is my weakness.

You are the treasure in my chest.

My heart can’t rest.

You are my before and my after.

The absence of laughter.

I’m held. You’re my holder.

My fortune is stuck in your folder.

My strength is this:

To shred the paper without looking.

To walk into the silence.

Here is a poem that I wrote in 2015, with an extra couplet added. It’s about the tightening of the snare of domestic abuse and the new couplet attempts to evoke the psychological effects of abuse.

I’ve recently been hooked on the Holby City Dom and Isaac story. Swearing at the television in fact. But I think that ended far too neatly and Dom was far to able to say what he needed to his perpetrator. Life’s not always like that.

The sense of documents being withheld and paper needing shredding seems to encapsulate how it ends for many people.

I’ve started the poem like a love song: Billy and Syreeta perhaps, ‘Born Again’. I’m sure that has the word ‘completeness’ in it.

But it ends with walking away, which is what victims often have to do: from their homes, their lives, their friends (or those they thought were friends), their families.

‘The silence’ is their new lives. One thing I have learned about survivors is that it takes them time (often) to find their voice. So that ‘silence’ is what ever the reader wants to imagine, and probably not silent at all after years of isolation.

(c) Becky Deans 2017