[DISCLAIMER: This passage contains references and implications of the following: physical/emotional abuse, gruesome imagery, abandonment.
There may be other triggers depending on the reader. Reader's discretion advised.]
The whip cracks...for the smaller ones I will endure the beating. But take a crack to my bones for the thrill and I will have your heads! Then what will you become, without your eyes to instruct you how to perceive? Once you have mutated how do you recognize your own tongue? Do you not tangle the language in your heads with those escaping your lips?
I remember. it's buried under the folds in my scars; cozy.
Your whip was braided with the twines of my youth mixed with strands of your split hair. You dyed it in cigarette ashes then polished it with the artificial sugars that foam from your mouth. For lifetimes I endured you. Many a night I feared you. Eventually I managed a step or two away from you. There is no more room on my body for your lashes-I am made of armor that you may not penetrate! this dog that I am for you is spayed! I can no longer breed with your lies to birth your expectations, accomplishments, nor another life for you to live through. Enough! I am not your mutt! I am no dog.
Do not attempt to cage me, I will feed on the iron you send through me. I will return them trailing fire! You will not keep me-child. For I have grown and you are frozen in a space we left long before my time! Run. You're good at that; running circles in the same place.
How you fear questions I ask and I crave the answers which make you squirm! To be or not to be. Is that not the answer, truly? You think you get it but you cannot grasp a thing so long gone in the time-dunes. Foolish child, look at yourself through your barren sockets! If they are honestly yours at all. Do you get it yet? can you feel those nasty critters crawling out of your neck? Oh, I see them! I taste the ones who dive headfirst into my mug. I lock eyes with them as they swim around in circles. In circles. They wreak of you. It used to be that I would drink that too; but now I throw it out back to you! It lands between your eyes and then I take another step away from you.
I will leave your heads someplace. Here, there and the other somewhere. I hope that when you come up to them, you'll make the decision so next time you are seen you will have but one crown. Then your neck would be sewn to keep away your pests. You would return your eyes and then we would trade words. Though I don't believe that even then I could take a single step toward you. I remember too keenly the bitter kiss of your whip. So do not cry when I turn my cheek.
Go child, go on, run out of your cage. You think you are all grown but no one ever is. I do not claim to be and you who are more infant than I shalt not dare to. It is a truth hard to swallow but that is when you will decide: the answer.