IF IT WASN'T ENOUGH

Would not the little plank-bed

 have been enough for me

 - rocking a hundred kilos,

 taking care over my beaten-down table,

 the dim lamp-light stood guard

 every night-early,

 so that when in chronological

 order the day murdered the night,

 I might have a safety,

 a shelter to cling to! 

Vengeful Vendetta-hands,

 the law of judging fists,

 daily created suffocating nightmares;

 it swelled the shadows of goblins,

 goblins, and leprechauns,

 cast on the knife-light wall:

 something was forever gone,

 past and broken! 

The secret bond that soothed all,

 and the chain of mother-child

 comradeships linked,

 and the sense of

 "there is a way out of aloneness"!

 I could only be a vagabond

 passing through, 

in all the murderous beatings,

 in all the bone-crushing laws,

 - but it was enough for me that,

 as an outsider,

 at least the Solitude of friendship

 took me in and dared to worship me! 

I received daily the nuclear blows

 of wars of nerves, with apocalyptic tears:

 in quiet, hidden nests,

 in the shelters of deserted street corners,

 I was raging with Sobriety:

 why was the lesser,

 the helpless defenseless one, hurt again?

 With my burning stigmata

 of humiliation and vulnerability,

 My face daily bore witness

 of self-willed humiliation and vulnerability! 

I have usurped the blue-purple

 stains of suffering, of trials,

 of the universal,

 contented Shame of the twitched,

 tossed, strangled past!

 It was an agonizing satisfaction,

 but at least it was mine all the while,

 even in the time of fate's blows!

 I could at least have let

 my self-pitying mouth turn

 to laughter and curl

 into a snort of hahoo!