Excerpt from maiden, the Ocean is Beneath the Stars

Song Cycle, Song from a little Brown Girl

Filial Piety III.

Eternally, it is doubtful that babies rest assuredly in embracing arms

Or in the original darkness, teetering between death and stasis

While the ephemeral essence looms near the connecting dimension

She is a shadow of a mother my true mother’s sinister imposter

Polluting the spaces surrounding, deliberate emotional violence.

Apathy bloomed from her barren breast in place of milk 

Alone, I suckled my tears and grasped at thin air 

Surrounded by lonely individuals, I occupied the peripheral sphere

My chest cracked like a whip choked by the specter of abandonment

And I sank to the seabed weighted by stones of karma, trauma, sorrow.

Our mothers have fallen into a tireless slumber

Locked away in the deepest chamber of an impregnable fortress

And hearts hidden hauled into mysterious vitreous jail cells

Dripping with exhaustion they haunt motherhood wailing like ghosts

Our mothers are tired as the children with phantasmic matriarchs.

-keo