Cartons of Ultrasounds

No need to ponder how little girls get raped into woman woes
...she was only 11…
With tramp stamped breast plate reading “wanna lick?”
No mother with gripped ‘no’s protecting her innocence
Wayward traveling clutched to hunger games fed by attention meat mongers
No need to ponder how little girls get raped into woman woes
Where hands dance across the face like memories
Bruise penned in the one-time promise
Never kept
Paint-by-number in mascara
Cover-up mistakes made
Connecting the dots with blush strokes that can’t add up to the number of lies preceding them
No need to ponder how little girls get raped into woman woes
As whispers of glitter quiet loved ones from worry
Wishing there was a different story to tell
But it’s cheaper to stay battered and beaten
Pinch pennies to window shop
Browsing glass bottoms for the one day
to read something new
No need to ponder how little girls get raped into woman woes
Training them to bare burdens
Bare chested under the weight of patricide
Or dick swabbed by faceless fathers
Where pleas for “daddy” go unheard
Head stroking for salvation
Only she can hear her heart beat breaking while it snaps under the pressure
…she was only 11…
No need to ponder how little girls get raped into woman woes
We teach them…
We team them by reminding them that their money-maker isn’t their minds
Pussy-powered in Hello Kitty
Strung up poles
Hung to dry on coke line residue
Dollars making the only sense
Since we teach them that Victoria’s Secret isn’t beyond the bed and bath
But into the arms of a wanton stranger
Plastering the tapestry of their worth as milk carton portrayals of what they could have been
...she was only 11…
And she could have been more
For now, all we do is replay each paragraph
re-pigment each newsprint page;
plug the space between with unknowns
unfound, unwanted by limited statutes
trudge forward as if they never bore the brunt
No need to ponder how little girls get raped into woman woes
We teach them…

"The Pulse Is Mourning" on WRTI 90.1 FM

"The Pulse Is Mourning" from Mahogany Nectar

(c) 2010 TS Hawkins

Performed on WRTI 90.1 FM 2012