The Kids Table

I’m watching women this week, taking cues from them
about how to deal with all this pain I’m feeling.
I see them being wise, funny, sad, sharp, smart, alert, aware,
compassionate, furious, strong, irreverent, wounded, bold,
undiminished, and way alive! Their pilot light is BRIGHT BLUE!

They must feel this time worse than me, but something's been coming up in me, too.

I haven’t been raped (nearly every woman I know has been raped
or abused), but I feel sad, scared, alone, vulnerable to attack, insulted, hurt,
and really fucking mad.

I look and listen to the sexist men up there at the top and feel
my own childhood rising again; bullied, belittled, physically threatened,
patronized, verbally cut up and reduced, punished, ignored and isolated.

The men told me to be physically brutal, but later they said
(gym class over, the football game over): now it’s time to grow up, Man Up, 
be reasonable, be rational, be like us, calm down, grow up (again),
take a breath, be realistic, all of it meaning: DON’T get emotional.

Which made me even more emotional, feeling scared and crazy,
which, in their bloodshot eyes, put me out at the Kids Table.

“Grow up, what you feel is not feasible, you’re not a serious person.”
Said and say the old men. Sit at the Kids Table, let the Adults (men) talk.

I’m full of PTSD from all my own childhood abuse, a recovered
(even reupholstered) alcoholic, and I’m allergic to peanut butter,
though that last one probably isn’t relevant here.

Well, go to hell you sexist old men. I’ve seen you before,
I know what you do. If you ever die and maybe you have it in your mind
you wanna go to heaven, I hope when you get there
it’s forever fucking closed to you.
No heaven, no hell, nowhere to go. See how you like it.

Speaking of nowhere to go: we're out here, the women and men like me,
we aren’t going anywhere. And there’s a lot of us.

Bless your hard sexist hearts, you old men. But namaste the fuck away from me.




(Written during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings)