Innocence lost
Maybe it was never there
Still counting the cost
U left me so bare,

Now my voice feels silent and mute
The time it was needed
Unheard or just ignored by the brute
My calls went unheeded

No means no
A phrase that’s everywhere
No means no
Doesn’t matter he didn’t care

Please don’t I remember pleading
But he’s got more power
And so I’m left with my insides bleeding
A harsh memory now a scar forever
No more human, I feel like just a numb thing

For months on end
I see you, a carefree unaffected man
So clueless, you like to pretend
Lying, claiming I am a fan

All these months I stood and saw
You hang with the guys, laugh and joke
Every second another part of me tore
While you sat socialised and drank your coke

Everytime I look at my wrist
I see your hand holding me down
Will I ever know if I was the first
Whatever I said it was like I never made a sound
But now with my sound you I curse

Wish I could cut my hand
At that point you held me
Wish I was in another land
So that human again I could be

The last year was filled with pain and tears
What do you do when true are your fears
I felt not worthy of people I cared about
Forgetting my friends, all I wanted to do was scream and shout

Soon a year later it will be
The incident and the pain, not yet just a memory
But stronger I am now
And today I take a vow

You will never own me or any other girl
Open the door and let justice come to your world
Your excuses and explanations are all lame
I may never be me again
But for you dear rapist it will be the end

For 11 months I tried to get my feelings down, but never could. Almost a year on this is what I managed. Sadly it doesnt even scratch the surface!

Could God Help Me?

Could God Help Me?
When I was struck down.
Watching my mother being posioned by a flower,
Sticking needles in the arm,
as if she called her savior.

Lost in the woods, Chained down,
To an iron crate, am I such a bad little boy?
To be beat again and again?
The blood runs thin from my mouth.

Thrown into the sewer like,
The piece of shit I am.
Starved nearly to death in jesus name,
Amen. Damn the Preacher’s hand.
He that condemned me to an awful numbness,
By beating the tears from my face.

Could I have changed? I was only 6

Would Jesus Sit me on his knee,
With all the other children?
Would he open his eyes to see?
Something different than the violence?
Abuse, the drugs and alcohol?

Could God save me?

While lying naked forced to suck
His minister off? And his son?
Could he have touched my life,
In not so perverse a way,
Instead, have given me faith?

Could God have saved me?

While saying grace, over an empty plate,
Eating from the left overs others waste?
Starring into the cold soul, of an overdose?
Watching so many dearly departed, in such awful ways?

Did he watch as I was raped?, Did he smile as he came?
Poisoning my drink? Some New Years party.
Or when, Some motherfucker, punched me square in the face,
Losing all my teeth, for trying to do the right thing,
And just walk away?

(God you can step in anytime…but…)
Could you have saved me?

As I laid naked in the street begging for release,
My my this drug has a hold on me.
Losing everything, but fear,
Fear of a dying man’s race. Could he?
When I lost my home, My job?
Again stranded in the streets
When My broken home, collapsed,
Heart broken, A man without a song.
Could he have saved?
Saved me, when he took love away,
Its long journey south of this place.
With amazing grace…
Could he?
NO! he just turned his head and walked away.

NO MORE, NO MORE

The Child cries, “No More! No more!”

The beatings never stop,
Till it’s to late,
Love is taught in many ways,
Pain maybe Hate,

With broken wings,
Angels cannot fly,
Beaten and raped,
Prepared to die,

Such is the child’s screams in the night….

All unheard…

“No More! No more!”
Bleeding, the pain still hurts,
His mother has raped his soul,
A body…bruised, and broken.
A heart that’s cold.

A child’s innocence is lost,
Never born,
A father amused and proud,
Of his masterpiece form,
His work,
Bloody, bruised, broken,
A violated child.

“No more! No more!”
“Enough is enough!”
“It hurts!”
The child screams.
Blood ridden victim,
Now tragedy…
Eyes scarred, tears streaming,
Becoming a macabre.
Bound to a father’s love
“You’re a man, real men don’t cry”
Papa says with each lashing.
Angels want to die.

Beating… Beating it never stops…
“No more…, No more…” whispered in final breath
Tortured…broken…sodomized…what’s left?
As he closed his eyes, angels did cry,
Asking forgiveness in, his parent’s sin,

“This is family, isn’t that right?”

Dad’s bloodstained hands,
Mom’s fulfillment of appetite,

The child lying in pools of blood urine and feces too,
Drowsed in semen and mom’s immorality too,
Mommy and Daddy just want to say “I love you”.

Child abuse is one thing No one should stand for, especially if it is your child.
One in three girls and one in five boys are sexually abused by an adult at some time during childhood. (Most sexual abusers are someone in the family or someone the child knows, not the proverbial stranger with a lollipop.)More than 80 percent of abusers are a parent or someone close to a child. Child abuse is far more likely to occur in the child’s home than in a day care center. Child sexual abuse has been reported up to 903,000 times a year, but the number of unreported instances is far greater.

Hate Crime part 1, Stare

Hate Crime part 2, Shoe

This set of photos is about the hate crimes committed against several in the LGBT community. By simply being themselves, these people are persecuted and tortured every day.

Childhood Lost

This piece reminds me of how precious childhood is, and how painful it is when it is taken away from you. The sadness, the emptiness… all come over you in a moment to shift out what was once a happy, cheerful, colorful life.

I was a simple child once. I lived in a house.

When I was 11 I sat on a toilet at my Grammar School. I investigated the smell of dried blood in a paper lined receptacle.

I didn’t understand as I didn’t belong, not yet.

When I was 12 I sat on our toilet at home reading directions I had pulled from a box of tampons. It seemed easy enough.

I didn’t understand that life as I knew it was surreptitiously eroding.

When I was 13 I sat on the lap of a friend’s father, his oversized hands cupped my emerging breasts keeping me from leaving.

I didn’t understand my body or him.

Filth and grime, blood and hair; simplicity hid and what was once still is vacant.

When I was little, I wanted to be Cinderella, smiling every time my tiny fingers skimmed over the yellowed pages of my favorite book. It was torn and aging but I kept it under my pillow and felt safe knowing it was there. My mother would come into my bedroom every night and read it to me before bed. As her calming voice acted out the story I knew so well, the enchantment of overcoming struggle lingered inside my ignorant brain since I didn’t know any better.

When I got older, my mother stopped her nightly visits and started drinking. My father gambled our money away and instead, he was the one who snuck into my bedroom while my mother passed out on the couch. Every night, just as I was about to drift to sleep, he would approach and kiss me roughly on the mouth. I would try to pull away, but he’d grab my arm and kiss me harder. As I’d struggle to break free, I wondered when my fairy Godmother would come and rescue me.

“Be a good girl and give daddy what he wants,” he’d say and I remember wishing he wasn’t my daddy.

“No,” I’d cry over and over, but he wouldn’t care.

He would trap me beneath the heaviness of his massive frame as I would struggle to free myself from his grasp. His breath always reeked of tequila and he’d climb into my bed, forcing my hands down there, asking me to feel the ‘…..’ through his jeans.

That first night, he nailed me to the bed then invaded me as I choked on my own tears. To avoid the pain, I remembered the book, tucked safely underneath my pillow, and thought about all Cinderella had to overcome.

Then, he left me crying.

I held the white cloth, soaked in my own blood, wanting more than anything to be able to hurt him back. The blood that drained into my mouth drowned out my cries and he was quickly gone. He probably went to drink some more.

I waited for my fairy godmother. I called for her, cried for her, begged for her to come take me away, but it was no use. She didn’t respond to my pleas. At the time, I thought it was probably because I didn’t have a ball to go to. I wished to be somewhere else, anywhere else – a forest, a castle, anywhere but the wicked stepmother’s house – but maybe fairy godmothers only granted wishes to girls who wanted to go to the ball.

I wished to go to the ball, but still, she never came.

It happened once a week after that and was the same each time. It had almost become a ritual for him. After he would leave and I’d cleanse myself, I read about Cinderella, hoping she would make me feel safe again. As the words hammered inside my head, over time, I began to realize they were filled with lies. There was no such thing as Prince Charming or Happily Ever After. The Fairy Godmother was just a fantasy and the Wicked Stepmother could not be defeated. Evil always won.

Daddy kept coming back.

***

That final night, when I turned thirteen, after my father crept out of my room and my mother passed out again, I watched the familiar pages curl up inside the blazing fireplace as I finally realized why they call such stories fairy tales.

Once the pages burned, and the house went down, I bought myself a tight black dress and shiny vinyl boots with a credit card I stole from inside my mother’s dresser. I hitched a ride to Tijuana and got myself a fake ID card, drowning my troubles in a bottle of Jack Daniels as the man, whose name I didn’t know, sat next to me, waiting for his magic blow job and anticipating the moment he could cum on my pretty face and turn it ugly.

My hands shaking, the sour taste in my mouth, I hang on to whatever lies ahead, fearing the end of my innocence will bring about my destruction and make me a slave to my own destiny. All because my fairy godmother never came.

(Anti-Cinderella is a short piece that took years to write, It evolved and got longer through the years, but the core story stayed the same: the consequences of child sexual abuse. This is a theme I explored in my short film, The Birthday Gift, which received tremendous response from survivors. A part of me is still unhappy and sees this piece as unfinished, but I feel it’s time to get it out there. I hope this story speaks to them like my film did.)

Medium: Silver Gelatin Print and Marker

Regards the abuse of Mothers and Daughters.

This painting involves the twisted family dynamics of patriarchal demands, matriarchal acquiesence, maudlin defiance, martyred sacrificial attachments, isolation, children trying to learn how to move within it, get away from it, get high and forget about it, laugh so you don’t cry, growing old enough to recognize the conflict source. It took a sorcerer to get there and reveal to me that dysfunctional family is a redundancy.

For all the children, women and men who feel empty and homeless inside because of being abused.