Helen of Troy

“The face that launched a thousand ships”

“I know now that to die without tasting this is truly not to have lived”

The sour embrace of the male gaze suffocates me like honey. Oozing down my throat, each sticky strand leaping between the walls of my throat until I can barely breathe at all. I sat in the car's back seat and found letters leaping from my brain and cascading down my spine, through my arms and out of my fingers. Stamping each letter into my phone. I looked upwards at the wide road ahead to see nothing but grey. Endless grey spilling ahead starving the earth of breath. I turned to my brother with love and prayed he would never understand nor make another understand the frivolous words illuminated in pixels on my screen. My phone buzzes in my hand. I return my gaze.

“I bet I could r*pe you.”

You launched ships under the guise of poetry. You leapt into battle, blinded by rage. You ran not for love, but to colonise. Your hand moved not by infatuation, but by the ever-present craving to claim what is not yours. You stampede our bodies. You flatten us, brand us, sculpt us. You plunge your knives into our flesh until you’re able to grasp a slice. You hold us in your fist, as our insides trickle down your forearm. You call your “admiration” love, but your obsession only ends with capture. You do not love. You simply claim. You care not for the words in my head unless they sing your worship. You care not for the poetry I paint unless it titles you as my god. You are to be my rapture.

To be loved by man is to be titled a worthy possession, to be shackled and clipped of your wings. To be fetishised for your differences in attempts to prove or defend their attraction to you. Your want to conquer my body is not love.

To be perceived by men is to be chased by jackals. To feel their stalking bodies slinking toward you. Their shadows paint distorted projections of your entrapment. Lurching toward you as the sun begins to set.

To be wanted by men is to stumble over an unforgiving litter of chihuahuas. Open jaws nipping desperately at your ankles. A cacophony of cries for attention. Grating away at your patience and compassion.

I hope they feel words rolling from my tongue as venom. Splashing corrosive drops of hate with each sentence I finish. I hope they see me as some ungrateful feminist bitch. I hope they leave me alone.

Growing up in this world I feel I am a vine.

A vine, climbing the eroded cement left crumbled between bricks. I continue to grow within this industrial complex. I feel shoots sprouting from my fingertips, reaching outwards. Exploring the very air around them, curiosity coursing through each tangled cable within me.

How lucky are we to lay our eyes upon this vast and luscious land for the first time each day? How excited I feel knowing I can continue my climb and soar.

Forever reaching for the sky but never quite able to weave myself throughout the clouds. How beautiful that we are never finished, each sensation only temporary. I look outwards and beyond, falling upon glazed eyes. Vines blossomed, explosions of colours, of delicacy. Plucked by greedy hands. Obsessed with taking such beauty to be their own. I find myself ripping such blossoms from my stems. Desperately trying to purge myself of anything that may attract these mounds of violence from drowning my nature in their clenched fists.

Every family needs a drama queen, so I took it upon myself to step up.