This is it. You can't change it. It's your legacy. It's ugly. You want a different story. You want to rewrite it. You want to make it better. You don't have a choice. This is it.

 You have to face your life. Your childhood or lack of childhood. You have to hurt so much that even a whole bottle of wine won't wash your sins away. You have sunk into a horizontal line that you keep trying to turn upright. Bash me down. Bash me down. Bash me down.

My mother is dead. Once upon a time there was a beautiful mother who still carried her happiness as an afterthought. Here it is with everything that isn't here. You can't make it better even if you read that phonetics book like a pro. I can see the hurdles and I am trying to read between the lines but I'm only four.

Four no more. Four and forty four and more. I love you mommy. You had to die. You are free from a prison body crushed by the heaviness of your pain.

 This is what suffering is all about. How dare you fly in the ether while I am left t0 drown in wine. Only Bukowski made alcohol beautiful. You left me as if I was satisfied to stay with Madame Alexander. Those boxes that promised joy and little women. I'm not so little.

I expand. I'm messy. I'm human. My cheeks have no rose. My lips are not pink and silent. My dress is not perfect and starched.

 I suck in this world. I have no box to call home. You died crippled beyond recognition from the woman demanding vowels in beautiful terror. You died in an agony of limbs severed.

I searched for saints. Someone to save me. Someone to save you. Here I am now alone. Only a smelly old dog keeps vigil with me. The dog and wine are my companions on Christmas eve. My first Christmas without you in this world.

I blamed you when I should have been blaming myself. You tried to tell me with all your faults. I wanted you to be strong for me. I wanted you to be strong for yourself.

No one knows what the woman suffers swept under the rug. I need to crawl away. I need to make noise. I need to be loud. I am the only voice left to sing the song of you and me.