Once a victim of bullying doesn't have to mean always a victim!
(Please note with all due respect for anyone who is not familiar with teenage slang in the UK - Grassing someone up means informing on them)
It’s safe here inside my head
There’s no one telling me I should be dead
Or making me feel bad about myself
I wish I was sitting at the back of the shelf
Where nobody even bothers to look
Like a day-gone-by old tatty book
Totally invisible to the naked eye
Paid no attention as they pass on by.
Today the problem is my style of shoes
Yesterday it was the weight I should lose
It doesn’t matter if I wear a trendy shirt
Because they still all treat me just like dirt.
Then there’s the texts on my mobile phone
So now I’m not even safe when I’m at home
I wish they’d get bored and move onto another
Which is what I was told when I spoke to my mother.
But nobody understands just how it feels
To want to take lots and lots of pills
To make the others just leave me alone
It’ll make no difference if I get rid of my phone.
They’ll just start to bully again face to face
About anything including my colour and race
So I feel I can’t win no matter what I do;
Change my hair, my shirt or my style of shoe.
Then I looked in the mirror and saw something new
I was a lovely person and I knew what to do
I grassed them up! That was the way I won!
It didn’t change the things they had done
But it finally gave me great peace of mind
Knowing I was no longer a victim of their kind.
And now I’m always smiling from inside to out
I know I did the right thing; in that there is no doubt!
Affirmation of self is perhaps the strongest of human resources to be called upon when that cloud of small minds and mean spirits hovers over us like a flock of experiential vultures. Truly a 'Through the Looking Glass' experience, I think. Very nice and eloquently expressed. I think I must 'track' you. Not to worry, since here in the Authors Den venue that expression is not synonymous with 'stalking', eh?...but you do seem to have a very clarified insight into common threads of daily concern that is both refreshing and rewarding. Mahalo a malama pono!
Kalikiano
Selected poems from previous & forthcoming collections together with Q&R apps on each page to enable audio rendition simultaneously with the written text
Early Works is an exhaustive compilation of the first decade of the poems and stories of Z.B.McClure. Included are family photos, rare personal photos, photos of 1st draft manuscripts of many of his early poems. Also some biography and memoir materia
Kalikiano
well written ... good rhyme & meter ...
Be safe,
Karen