My stepfather

Were you really here?

Or were you there?

Carried away on a destitute piece of imagination, hardly won but fiercely kept?

Perhaps like a leaf, freely roaming around the pits, the cellars, and the well where you were kept like an animal.

Slowly drowning in the demeaning. In the tantalizingly inhumane.

But dream you could. You dreamt of a future. Light. But dreams turned to darkness. Like you hadn’t already seen and heard enough death.

Dreams performing like banshees, heralding in the demise and death of a loved family member.

Only, it was you. You were the one that was dying. Day by day. Year by year. Every second you became a little less. Screaming inside ever so slightly more minute by minute.

The wrath of every fiber in your body couldn’t stop them then. Electrocuting you.

Your shaking fists scrambling to mobilize every last amount of force in your body couldn’t prevent them. Penetrating you.

The twitches of your legs couldn’t help you from them. Smashing your soles.

The skin on your back, sweeping your spine like a delicate cocoon, couldn’t persuade them. Tramping on your back; breaking your spine.

Your screams from that solitude of near existential annihilation. Waterboarding.

Not even the passage of time could be so kind as to ease your suffering. Quite the contrary. It just turned into a different kind of suffering.

At least there can be no torment in death.