People Have Mocked Her Story For Years. Now She's Going Up To The Mic And Taking It Back.

http://www.upworthy.com/people-have-mocked-her-story-for-years-now-shes-going-up-to-the-mic-and-taking-it-back?c=upw1



To the guy in the back of the room complaining about listening to another rape poem - when people ask me why I took years of writing poems to write this poem, to write the rape poem, I will tell them all about you, how you watch this stage the same way you watch CSI. You already know what's coming next. It's just another mangled body. I am just another hit and run, so you take this time to take another drink. I'll tell them how every story sounds the same when you stop listening, like this is just another rape poem. This is another little girl lost poem, another do not touch me until I ask you to touch me poem, another seven years old sleeping with a Tinkerbell wand on my nightstand and a kitchen knife underneath my pillow because I swore the next time he came into my bedroom uninvited, he would come out bleeding poem.

And I get it. I know that you're tired of hearing rape poems. I am tired of hearing rape poems, the same way soldiers are tired of hearing their own guns go off. Believe me, we all wish the war was over, but friend, you are staring out at a world on fire complaining about how ugly you think the ashes are. The poems are not the problem. We have built cathedrals out of spite and splintered bone. Of course they aren't pretty. Nothing holy ever is. Think of Gandhi's blistered feet. Think of that crown made of thorns and the sweat on your mother's sacred chest as she pushed to get you here. The work is never pretty, but it's the only way the house gets built. So I am sorry that you don't want to look at my wreckage, but I have carpentry in my mouth. I have a hammer in my hands. You cannot stop me from building. And as long as you are there in the back of the room, I am going to be here, voice made from smolder because this is my story, and you cannot take this from me.