What would you do if your relationship was falling apart?
Try to fix it?
Wong answer.
Marriage today is no more reliable
Than a flimsy paper plate.
Too much food to digest and it breaks.
Not a problem, just go find another.
Marriage used to be made of ceramic;
You’d have to let go or throw it away
To send it to pieces.
Yet, even then,
With enough care and time,
The shards could be joined again.

Now the problem is a common
As those barely usable platters.
Everyone thinks they understand
The throbbing ache of watching
That plate strain under pressure
Until finally it gives out.

But they don’t. They cant.
They can’t see how incessant
Screaming can drive a son,
Only looking for a reprieve, to drugs,
And how that escape finally ‘saves’ him.
How the battle turns a melody of a mother
Into a cacophony of a drunken waste,
And a father sprinting into the sea.
And certainly they can’t see
How it would drive a child to feel
The judgment of a thousand
In one curious glance.
No.
They just think
I am a shy simple girl
With nothing interesting to say,
And that my parents just happen
To be divorced.
They don’t see that every second
Of every day is spent
With this dragging weight;
The lifeless form of who I used to be.

But, out the back gate,
Down a few blocks and cross the street,
Go one more block, and take a right
And you find a path
Only a wild beast would follow,
Though the overgrowth
To my sun-dappled clearing.

Here, the sun kisses my cheeks
Like my father would
When he still came home,
And the wind plays with my hair
Like my mother would
When I still fell asleep in her lap,
And the grass cradles my body
Like my brother would
When I fell in my rush to catch him.

It is in solitude I find my family,
And here I find my haven.