Pushed away and beaten

She crawls into a corner and hides

From the world around.

Thinking to herself,

“What did I do?”

To her this is everyday life.

To you, this would only be a dream.

Blood coming from her nose and her cheek,

She wipes it away with a small shriek.

She feels the pain, but it doesn’t sink in.

She sees the blood, but it just drops to the floor.

She doesn’t want people to know what goes on at the house across the street.

Because she knows that if they do, everything would be worse.

Knowing that if outside the house, people would wonder and stare.

Not being able to bear the humiliation of the cuts and bruises deep in her skin.

She hides in her room, isolated from everybody.

She knows no one.

No one knows her.

She dies under her blanket curled in a ball.

No one cried at her funeral, no one came.

She got buried in a casket made of twigs and leaves.

Her skeleton rots between dead wood.

But nobody cared, nobody knew that she didn’t die from starvation.

But from suffocation.

Suffocation from the outside world, and a caring family.

She died from not knowing what it was like to have everything she ever wanted.

But nobody cared when she died deep beneath the cloth.

And nobody ever will.

Poetry