(beatings)

I was bullied,
not by their beatings
but the talk of them.
Words were always enough
for me.
The tales I heard
of my sister’s defiance,
refusing to do what
she was told, until
she was whipped
into submission.
At least that is
the way I think
the story went.
Decades later
my father recounted
how I cried,
when he spanked
my little brother
until I shamed him
enough to stop.
“You’re going to
kill him,” he said
I said.
I can’t believe
I was that brave,
I don’t know if I ever
stood up to him again.
But I guess that was
my fear.

I have lived
with raging men
all my life.
I don’t know
if there is any
other kind.
Or what makes them
that way,
what frustration
of their force
that makes it back
up on them like that.
I only know it is
women and kids
who pay the price.
they don’t do it
to other men,

royal beatings
is my term, one I often heard
but picked up again
from a book,
the place where I
have gotten everything.
I cana tell when that
is what I’m defending
myself against, not
the real thing,
not even the memory
of it. I never got
a spanking because
I knew how not to.
do what you have to
and stay out of the
way.
Roayl beatings, I say
when I find myself
seeking protection
against some hurt,
the way that victims do
with comfort of another
possibility somewhere else.
I show you the character
in the story says,
or something to that effect –
the way I consoled myself
when my mother forgot me
in the shopping trip,
with sewing my aunt had
promised me. I never made
that mistake again,
my mother said,
but it was by then
too late.