Beehive
These hands are not his hands,
they are my hands.
But sometimes in my mind they are his hands,
and other times they are not hands at all,
they are claws.
That crawl their way between the cracks of my skin,
scooping out the love and leaving behind the shame.
I do not need protection from a man,
it is a man who I need protection from,
the only hands that hold me through the night are my own.
And as I sink into the darkest corners of my mind,
I gain comfort in the sensation of my hair clinging to my damp cheeks.
Tears are old friends that visit me at times like these,
when the monsters under my bed,
stop playing hide and seek.
His hands were greedy.
Once I had offered the treasures that are required for a man to feel satisfied and
only then I would have peace of mind. In order to
survive I would conjure up spectacular stories:
one contained a lion who was addicted to honey. And so,
he ventured determinedly through endless acres of woodland,
destroying every beehive, he could find.
But no amount of honey could fill his needs.
And so, eventually he died.
You are the lion,
and that night your fingers were searching for honey.
But instead of honey I began to bleed.
Perhaps, you assumed it was my first time.
You were not right.
A woman holds the sweetest honey between her thighs,
honey that no thief has the privilege to try.
You were a thief,
you stole my voice and my choice that night.
Took all my hopes and childhood dreams,
crammed them into the pores of my skin and sewed them into the seams of my knickers.
You grew like bacteria in all the impure parts of me.
I scrubbed my body till it bled again.
Every meal I ate, I vomited out.
I wore oversized clothes, and spent most of my days under the sheets,
but my palms still carried the sweat, whilst my feet struggled to carry me.
I did everything I could to detox you out. But my body jerks and clenches in the night, my hands grasping, mouth gasping for air.
These hands,
the ones that carved out your name hundreds of times on my thighs,
were also the hands that taught me the meaning of pleasure on sleepless nights.
These hands,
spent what felt like an eternity,
putting each part of my body back together,
and now
these hands hold that of another.
And those hands showed me
how splendid it can be
when you let the right lion search for your honey.