what happened to me happens to everyone who needs me present

it is a wooden dinghy in a storm    my heart    in how it affects how I am in relationship    and a state library of echoing chambers in a red lit room for business    and river birds    yes your freedom means my imprisonment in disregard    everything you couldn’t process participating in and witnessing keeps happening after the bombs stop dropping    the death of silence as presence    to not know what it is like to not have my life under threat  from brothers    my father    from 30 years of looking over my shoulder at an expired IVO on a veteran    a brain aneurysm    a man was shot out of my father’s arms    he was dragging him as prisoner of war to camp    shot out of his arms by a fellow soldier    you tell me of burying bodies    regardless of what side they were on    dug up by animals every time I ask for a future    every time my mother visited my exiled grandmother she would tell her it was the last time she would see her alive    my mother drove erratically in the rusted Holden saying we wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore    I was in the back seat unrestrained    trying to keep us alive by not having needs    why tell me you may be dead tomorrow    no one has the monopoly