An Autobiography In Twenty-Five Lines of Poetry

Something written in the Chilli writing group last week.  I may write more poems with exactly the same title, each one an autobiography.  Or a facet of an autobiography.  Perhaps on another day I'd write a very different tale of the same life.  I remember holding the cupboard door handle firmly sometimes.  Not so that I could escape.  Rather, so nothing and nobody could break into my safest space.

An autobiography in twenty-five lines

From beginnings, I swept my life under the carpet,
Knight move patterned, rule crossed rooms,
Dreamed of disappearance.  Through the cracks
Of heating vents into the pipe world, warm,
Washed, safety in silence, family free.

Cupboards too, watching imagined lights
Play honestly behind closed eyes
Shut out terror in wardrobes,
Among photographic smells, buried under coats
With a failing torch, unfound, under stairs.

Wake me up from escape.  Only protect
This multitude from memory, the half-certain
Smiles, the blank faces, black and white
Child actor, blanker still in eighties Kodachromatic
Colours.  Knife scratched out even at Christmas.

Growing in freedom, meaning found in fallenness.
Willing slave to God, insecticide sprayed self,
Neglected among weeds.  Baftas languish on a shelf.
Dusty, walls cracking, bleeding into Prozac,
The first of a million slow deaths.

From endings, carpet ripped, naked threads.  Rape stained.
The house sold, chapters closed and burned.
Mistress of postponement, created her world in seven years.
Tigers eyes; diamond cut; a scarless resurrection.
Washed, safety in self-worth, finally free.