Sleepless

I cannot sleep next to you at night
because you give old wounds New life
but it has nothing, my love, to do with you,
but the man who, my soul he tried to slew
What gives a man the right to posess another
by excuse of an unloving mother?
He swore to never let me love another
and put my whole world and life asunder.

Tis his memory I wrestle nightly
of this man who didn’t treat me rightly
and to prove to himself he was mighty
had to crush my spirit and humanity nightly

In my sleep, your arm becomes his
replaying a gruesome battle of wits
still bound at ankles and wrists
as my soul and my clothes he rips.

My screams again go unheard,
as he rapes body, he rapes mind with words.
yelling “there is no God” when I try to pray,
and hurting me worse for attempts to get away.

They say I’m lucky to be alive,
he intended to kill me that night
But the waking dead I feel some days
though I have few scars to display.

Though he sits in an iron cage,
and the law says the debt is paid
in my own prison I remain,
in shifting walls of revisiting pain.

So I lie sleepless in my invisible cell,
for sleep revisits my personal hell,
Your gesture a part of me longs for
serves as key to an unpleasant door.