Wrecked (a poem by 13-year-old me)

He didn't ask.

She wasn't even a body,
to him she was just
virgin ground to be claimed,
a thing to be used
and left behind.

A swallowed scream,
no poetry in that.
Mechanical grinding,
like sandpaper
pressed hard into
the softest place.

After that
she was nothing,
a worthless hole,
then the world turned
and called her broken
because she bled.

Whispers followed:
She let him.
She wanted it.
She's a whore.

No one saw the burn
still pulsing beneath her skin,
the way she scrubbed herself
until it blistered.

Virgin blood
spilled in the wreckage.
 

--

Another one from deep in the archives. Sorry it's pretty raw, and maybe a little disturbing. I was 13 when I wrote this - it was one of the first poems I ever wrote. It expressed what I was feeling at the time, and I still believe poetry saved my life by giving me an outlet for all this. If I kept it inside it would have killed me. It almost did anyway.

It's not very good poetry, but it's a peek inside the mind of a broken 13-year-old. I've come such a long way from there. I have a huge stack of journals filled with stuff like this - some of it much more disturbing, and most of it I'll never share with anyone. But it's there, on paper, where it can't hurt me anymore.