Persephone

Persephone cried when the light went out at the top of the tunnel

Her body lurched at the thought of a life undetected, unacknowledged.

Her vigor meant nothing, she was ashamed.

Her duty had been to meander between the earth's impositions and it dawned on her how she had simply fed right into man.

Their lies and evil coherencies nestling cozily within her mind.

The epitome of womanhood lost.

Like Persephone, my realization of life determined by man bled harshly into the walls around my brain.

It allowed me a regretful distaste in my mouth, a feeling not so simply washed away.

Sure I’d try to gulp down magazines and general propaganda but it was driven in a maddening way by man.

Even the way I cared for my body was secured by mens inventions and unauthentically repositioned at me as if it was worth its weight in gold.

In reality, most inventions by men for women seeped with a special toxin that really proclaimed just how worthless we were to them.

Hades took Persephone for show, for the allure and gusto.

Maybe to prove his miserable life wasn’t so grief filled.

If only every man could manage a woman, could lock her away and show her off to all the world on his simple command.

That’s what men like.

Listen, don’t speak.

Look pretty as a woman but in ways that are girlish, childlike.

I’m sure that's why Hades could only dare to take Persephone, Demeter’s daughter.

Men crave the young, the vulnerable, the pure so they say.

In their sick cravings, they’ve created a mass acceptance of the general thought that women should be girlish.

Shaved legs, shaved pubes, small waist, small arms.

When a woman becomes full in her belly for a baby has been placed inside her womb, she expands further into womanhood where men find only obscurity, fear, and disconnection.

They lose their girl completely, and they find it’s mostly simpler to go off and find a younger girl to satisfy their taste buds whilst their woman is under such strain.

It’s unbearable for men to belong to women.

To treat them with a total capacity of acceptance and understanding.

To quietly listen instead of screaming over them and laughing in their face as they state their desires.

Have women always been so wrong?

Have we been so shut out, disgraced, discouraged?

Haven’t we had to find new routes to live, created our own paths to lay down a home and at the end of the day still be struck down by a pathetic man.

The boulder on our shoulders seems to shift and perversely we’re blamed for the weight we’re assumed to carry.

We’re at fault for our pain.

We’re witches, we’re impure, we don’t give our man enough sex.

We’re items.

Used, tossed out, reused to be thrown away again, forever meeting the needs of our brothers, fathers and sons, forever neglecting our needs as human beings.

Yet the world does that for us, so it’s so much easier to shift right into that draining position.

To be run completely dry and called weak for being less of a woman than those around you holding it together far better.

Why do men get to decide?

Every question, every answer, every sign and symptom of our pain--men decide.

We’ve internalized the script that even when we speak, our voices are never loud enough, are never listened to quite so intently, are never nourished in the same way as men.

Don’t forget this system hurts us both.

Where women have lost their sense of self and been mutilated by men who claim they don’t hate women, there is a boy who feels the same sense of worthlessness by men around him.

Who is simply not good enough to be a man, not strong enough, not mean enough.

He must be vulgar, he must not cry, he must bash his friends heads together and laugh at his abuse.

He must grip a woman's wrist tightly as she squirms from his clenching hand.

He must push her into a dark corner and pin her against the wall, placing kisses on her neck that are filled with poison.

He must lift up her skirt as she screams, he must like the screams.

And when he tells his friends they’ll all laugh about what a tease she was, the perfect victim for their perfect night out.

Just boys being boys.

A relentless story told day after day.

Yet a story never heard by a single soul, as if they whispered the whole narrative in a bustling subway station.

And the woman will tell her story too, yet it will be even softer than the man’s.

The world will cackle at her.

She’s a whore, she could never be a wife, that’s why that happened to her, she’s just a no good slut.

Her body will lie covered by her low hanging head.

She’ll walk the streets with fear and her story will melt into the background of the city.

Her words will die in the crowd because they mean nothing to the people passing.

She’s worthless to them too.

She’ll recall Persephone, her pleas to freedom and their unreceived calls.

Trapped by a man.

A man from a woman.

All men coming from women.

All men hate the women who bathed, clothed them, shed tears with them, loved them.

All men decide exactly when a woman has used up her time.

Before that fateful moment she’s offered some service to the man, beyond that fateful moment she’s accosted by her worthlessness and tossed out for irrelevancy.

Her wants are not heard.

Her needs become quite meaningless.

She has primed and died off and now she can no longer be used by men.

It becomes safe for a woman who cannot be used by a man.

She holds herself differently, no longer owing the world.

Her time is hers, she owes it to herself.

That freedom comes late for women and by then we’re so worn out from a man’s world, we might just sit quietly in thought for the rest of our days.

Perfecting the knowledge in our minds and relaying it to our grandchildren as they wander about this new lay of land.

A possible change in projections as women lay the seeds in their youth, blossoming flowers of femininity and masculinity, intertwined, exchanged and nourishing one another.

A new day will dawn, where Persephone is freed from her cage and women and men are bound by their immense respect and understanding for one another, rather than self hatred confounded and projected in the same way.

Men can determine this consequence, women are not nestled quite so powerfully to the throne of creating order for the world.

Our society is determined by functionality, women will lay the seeds, we will spark the ideas, we will scream for a new day, but men continue to be advantageous in every position of power and prose, their narrative is the one written and remembered, not ours.

Persephone’s story ends with Hades, and the seasons change and still she dwells, working on the clock of man, living by the hands of man.

Giving, breathing, loving, doing, and dying all for the sake of man.

What a wonderful world for a woman to know.

What a wonderful time for change.