Bruises Heal
Bruises Heal
Names, cold shoulders,
Silence in the canteen;
Her words are scalpels.
Cutting self esteem.
“Stuck up little cow!
Thinks she’s really it!”
Laughter slices, she prescribes
A sharp, unfunny wit.
Ridiculed for standing out,
My marks are much too high
And so she drip-feeds saline hate,
injecting with a lie.
She’s bright, she’ll find
The weakest spot to pierce and prod and poke
She uses stealth, and poisoned words
And wears them like a cloak.
It seems I am her favourite game
And I’m the one who loses,
if she’d done this with her fists,
At least there would be bruises.
Copyright: from Poems with Attitude (Hodder, 2000), copyright © Andrew Fusek Peters and Polly Peters 2000, used by permission of the authors and the publisher