When I was young

I felt broken

I felt like a jigsaw with pieces

Missing

I felt like anxiety and desire

Kissing

In a tortured embrace

I felt like there were parts of me that would

Never

Not be broken

Parts of me that would never be

Spoken out loud

Secrets locked in boxes with

Shame

Written on them

I felt like a precious vase

Alone and abandoned

On the floor in a thousand pieces after a storm

Still warm

With no one to witness the utter

destruction

I was ceramic shattered so hard

That hope was gone to

Put me back together

I would have to discard

Not even gold could unite me

I would not become

Synergy

Life took my child

And ripped her open

Like the piñata at my 11^th birthday party

Sweets spilling out across the

Spiky grass

On a cloying spring day

And it took years to repair the damage

So long I started to loose hope

But repaired the damage was

And hope lost regained

As life handed me

New materials

With which to build myself back up

Shame was rubbed off

The box of my secrets

Which spilled out into the world

As I embraced them as part of who I am

Secrets now sewed in bright colours

Into the fabric of the adult

Writing

These

Words

A patchwork person

I am an artists interpretation

A visual representation

Of the pieces of me

I have collected through the years

With deliberate determination

I am a sky full of scars

The proof that I won each

Internal and external battle

I am a library full of stories

The proof that I

Learnt the moral at the end

I am loved and love

For I am just as much the

People who I love

As I am me

And it is these people

Who truly connect me to this world

When I was young

I was incomplete

For I did not know

That the pieces of my jigsaw

Weren´t missing

They no longer belonged

To me

That the shattered shapes

On the floor opened the door for

Me to draw a new shape

When I was young

I was clothes in the washing machine

Being battered and drowned

Unaware of the start and finish

Unaware of the purpose

Unaware that I would emerge

Butterfly

Now emerged as I am

With love in my heart

And pen in my hand

I know that

I am

Not

Broken