DOCU-POETRY
DOCU-POETRY
BULLY in the
SPOTLIGHT
These poems are an accumulation of events experienced personally or gleaned from news stories. Grown in a petri dish of time and viewed under a microscope, they form a collection dealing with the snakes and piranha within society, the trail of devastation that they cause, and the survival skills employed by many of their victims. Two poems are a collage of real-life personalities or occurrences; combined they more potently convey the societal impact. As with docu-drama a minimum of artistic liberties are taken with the facts.
I hope you are a lover of poetry. Several of my chapbook poems follow. Most of them are dark, but I also have a light and joyous side with a reverence for nature which you can explore at Journey To Light or
e-mail jherschlag@comcast.net
You can order “Bully” for $9 incl. postage
ALL THIS IN ONE YEAR
And on Christmas Day
an angered driver shoots
my friend’s daughter—
in the back seat with her
three-year-old
Holly watches blood spurt
from Mommy’s head
hears Daddy scream
Help me Help me
He shot my princess
Six months later
my neighbor enters her lobby
finds her college-bound daughter
dying on a stretcher
Cops apprehend the masked ex-husband
who says, With each knife plunge
into our daughter
I gutted my wife’s heart
And one mile from me
a paranoid passenger
on the Long Island Rail Road
shoots twenty-five riders
Six die
But they say
the murder rate in New York
dropped this year
OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM IS OUR COLLATERAL
Asthmatic bronchitis, infectious hepatitis,
ulcerative colitis, flu, typhoid fever,
costochondritis, kidney infections, flu,
osteomyelitis, peritonsillitis,
Sjogren syndrome, flu, hypoglycemia, rhinitus,
sinusitis, flu, thyroid cancer and diabetes—
the visible gifts from Father.
Protracted fear and rage,
the unseen silent killers
inseminated into me,
grew stronger with each rape.
Their accrued psychic harm
is obvious to many.
Not so with damage to the brain—
years of stress-induced,
high glucocorticoid levels
produced permanent neuron loss
throughout my hippocampus,
shrank it—neurons
to the seat of memory burned out,
connective conduits fried.
Had I not buried fear and rage,
had I been strong enough
to remember each rape,
had I murdered my psychic killer
by going public,
my immune system would not
have succumbed.
Hiding, letting buried memories
and feelings secrete hormones
to do their frantic work at night,
magnified, extended the rapist’s
thrust long after his death.
Harm to mouth, vagina, anus,
was just the beginning.
Rapists invade each cell
and educate the body,
yield a doctorate in abuse.
Truces occur but scars remain
in the vestiges of our b
Rape is a Grand Larceny
of the self
and the immune system
Instinct for homeostasis
exists within us.
Trying to retrain my nervous system
I do yoga, meditate, and
write, write, write.
WHY DON’T DOCTORS KNOW?
Tied she was,
as I was. In last night’s tv
documentary, Genie, the wild child
found at thirteen, still in diapers
and tied to the potty in her bedroom,
no curtains, pictures, anything
for her eyes to eat.
Skinny she was,
her feet could barely step,
legs bent so long on the potty.
Her arms worked, eyes sort of worked,
her voice was swallowed years ago.
Silent as me, I thought,
when Father did sex things.
Hers, no sex, just beatings. Mine did beatings
but I had the world outside my room, outside
my house. She had a potty. When they found
her, (miracle angel face, wide-eyed curious,
with caution-knit brow), she soon laughed,
her hungry hands touched, touched my pulse
as she, like a blind child, finger-surveyed
objects. Her eyes had never seen
anything but her body, four walls, a crib
she was often not allowed to sleep in, her
potty and bare floor. I think she too did
not know how, was forbidden to cry. Her ears,
never word-fed, could not teach her tongue Ma Ma,
No. All I want is to hold her, hug her,
rock her, as I wanted all
those years to be held. How naked
she must have felt, no humans except for
beatings. In my mother’s womb my twin and I
shared fluid space, then shared a bedroom.
In there she was deaf and blind as
the floral wallpaper to Father’s presence.
When doctors took Genie in she filled a long shelf
with glasses of liquid, as do others like her.
Doctors don’t know why. But it’s their piggy bank
for future thirsts. Thirst hurts worse than hunger-
dry eyes hard to blink, no tears, mouth parched;
one’s heart shrivels, its beat weakens. Doctors
are perplexed by her rabbit-walk. Let them sit
years on a potty, to learn, legs don’t unfold
easily. Why don’t experts hire
an abuse survivor. We know what they don’t.
Institutionalized, stuffed back into a bottle,
Genie how do you live?
Poems from Bully In The Spotlight—
All This In One Year
Our Immune System Is Our Collateral
Why Don’t Doctors Know?