Position:Home>Poetry> An ongoing prose for your review and comment, mostly regarding the narrative voi

Part One if you are so inclined to read it to help you form an opinion!. Thanks!. http://answers!.yahoo!.com/question/index;!.!.!.

The Beginning Now Ending (Part Two)

The next fourteen years remained much the same!. We moved to ten different houses in ten different states!. Military housing!. Never our own!. You couldn't paint walls, you couldn't plant gardens, no need to root, you'd be gone!. What went on within those four walls!? Still a house and never a home!. The pain remained our own, though!. It packed well from house to house!.

I discovered my 5 year old ploy remained, indeed, the safest!. I grew too big to hide behind skirts, but found ways still to hide, remain invisible!. Fall in line, do as told!. Ask no questions, tell them no lies!. Give sharp salute to man in charge, despite the fact that as he earned more rank, he became more rank!. More demanding in tone, more angry at life, more pompous in his military stance!.

Mother grew tired of her brood of three, especially the last, who was unwanted, me!. She grew tired, too, of being a wife, for nine months ran away from us all, into the arms of a lover!. It was in her absence, this invisible, unwanted one became a poor substitute in father's bed!. His touch remained foreign still, but now he added filth!. I missed my mom and now I missed me!.

Duly dumped by her lover when he returned to his family of four, she returned to us, but she was no more!. I still missed my mother, but not her bed!. In room next to theirs, I heard him make her cry as he had so often made me!. Day after day, we were told, she came back for the family, for the sake of the kids!. And this invisible, unwanted one, found her alone each time she tried to take her own life!. Count 'em, four in all!. But her life was already gone, strange expression, "taking one's life," she was merely trying to end her pain!.

By the time I was nineteen, first year in college, I still lived at "home!." Both siblings gone and married, parents needed me in their game!. He to verbally abuse and she to cry out her woes!. Trying to keep my own life from melting down, I bravely informed them that I had been awarded a grant, could move in to the dorm, no cost to them, I would be their middleman no more!. Dad exploded, pounded the table, said, "You walk out those doors, they'll be closed to you forevermore!."

And so like mother, I walked!. Not into the arms of a lover, but away!. Just away!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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