Shame - Taxidermy of my pieces

It was Saturday night and I had the happiest time
I had had in months
I danced to my favorite songs with my new favorite people
And I brought a sweet man home
We had a fantastic evening and shared love and satisfaction
Next morning, I slept on his arms knowing that was my choice to make
Mom sent me a text saying she was never more ashamed of me
24 year old widow, bringing men home
She says she's sad, she says she's disappointed
She says I haven't learned anything she tried so hard to teach me
Mom never understood that sex isn't about being used by men
Maybe because that's what it always was for her
Maybe that's why I never blamed her for the abuse I've suffered
For the things she indeed never taught me
So when she took her boyfriend to watch me take a bath when I was six,
I asked her to stop in my childish voice
I could feel his eyes like an X-ray machine
Scanning my underdeveloped body with his male radiation
Leaving scars and tumors of fear
Just to beat her up in front of me when I was seven
So maybe that's why I never blamed her
When I was 16 and the neighbour said he was going to help my spirit
And ran his old, shrugged hands all over my body
My breasts, my vagina, my mouth
Like an amateur painter who never understood the art and the angst of being a woman
Sponsored by years of silence and sexism
He left his horrific art work all over my teenage body
He made me a suit of fragile glass out of his old hands
And I could never wash away his fingerprints
So I stayed silent until I was 23 and found out he kept doing it to other women
To women who had a voice stronger than mine
To women who were unashamed of their trauma
To women who knocked on his door and destroyed his wife's reality
When I told mom, she was so angry, and Grandma was just so sad and furious
I thought they wouldn't believe me, because Mom asked me to kiss her boyfriend goodbye on his lips, like I did to her
On the day of the country party, 7 year old in my red dress flushed to my face as I refused to see that man as my father,
And Mom made me kiss his cigarette stained lips because she really wanted a husband
So maybe that's why I never blamed her when she said she had a disease for 20 years and never told me
When I was 19 and in the most abusive relationship of my life
I never told him to stop touching me, even when it hurt
Maybe that's why I never blamed Mom for not providing me with treatment
Because she had faith
I tried to tell Mom that I am not being used, I tried to tell her that I was happy, but she could only see shame
I couldn't sleep, and when sleep finally came, I had a nightmare
Mom was there, and I refused to stay next to her
I yelled at the top of my lungs
"It's your fault, it's your fault, it's your fault"
Like a predator, I circled her in red paint and accused her of the abuse she refused to look at
Shame on you, Mother, for trying to shame me for my choices
Shame on you, Mother, for treating me like your property
Shame on you for being sad when I was happy
Shame on you for being blind when I was hurt
Over and over and over again
Shame on you, Mother, for teaching me to be ashamed of my own body
My body, not yours
My young body that you submitted to X-Ray men, amateur painters with white hair and boyfriends who would touch me as their property
Shame on you for never seeing the marks and the scars that made me anything but someone worth of you sadness and pity
Shame on you for teaching me to close my legs, not to wear that dress and not make it easy for them
When you made it so easy
Shame on you for teaching me to feel shame of my body,
Because I was too fat, too easy, too intense
When my dreams and memories expose the parts that you let them take away from me
When I see those parts reflect on my insomnia face
I see the heart on the bracelet you gave me shine against the glass
I see the body parts perfectly lined up according to time and level of fear
Like a taxidermist, I investigate them, the cigarette stains, the suit of fragile glass broken too many times and beyond repair, the tumors of male radiation
Keeping dead parts of me stuffed and pretending they are living organisms
Forcing myself not to be ashamed
And if you look at them from the evidence pictures
They will spell my name as one word:
Trauma.