The phone call went badly,

again – the old arguments about

how you were never a mother to me,

and why, why couldn’t you just love me

as if such hurts had answers.

The weeping – so blue, so literary.

At fifty, she was still stuck

on the old suppurating wound,

repeating the same accusations.

“The damage,

the damage you’ve done.”

She didn’t want her to think she’d

survived it unscathed. Not ever.

She’d worked so hard to become

something she wasn’t.

Someone must be to blame.

She was so clean,

so impossibly clever –

how could she not be happy?

this unformed artist weighed down

by other people’s baggage.

When the mother said:

“You have to work with it, use it,

create with it”…,

she howled:

“Stop talking over the top of me.”

It was like saying get rid of your self.

Knowing herself that well,

she hardly knew what she was.