Partial lyrics to Zero 7 "In the Waiting Line"

Do you believe
in what you see
motionless wheel
nothing is real

Wasting my time
in the waiting line

Do you believe
in what you see

Everyone's saying different things to me
different things to me...

Lullabyes for little criminals

"At the waiting room of Family Services downtown, I felt as if I were in formaldehyde, one of the little fetuses in jars at the chemistry lab at our school. I'd been removed from my natural environment and brought here to be studied. If someone stuck a pin in my side, I doubt that I would have felt anything.

"Lots of times when children draw a person on a blank piece of paper, they don't draw any background at all, just a person standing there without any context. That was me...

"You had to think that you were a superhero and that the cold could not affect you. It could not even touch you. Or at least that's what I had to do. Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel.

"Is there inside of everybody the self that comes out when you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there."

-Heather O'Neill, Lullabyes for Little Criminals

Don't become a statistic

"I know how bad the odds are for girls like me.

"We wait to be rescued, but for whatever reason, no one comes. We figure that if no one protects us then we must not be worth protecting so we become prey are and easily picked off. Our wounded, kicked-puppy gazes attract sly predators and we sell ourselves for clearance sale prices, mistaking screwing for caring.

"We binge, purge, sleep around. We drink too much and get too high, anything to blot out the past. We accept and endure beatings and humiliations because our fathers, our uncles and our mother's twisted boyfriends said they loved us, too, right before they broke our bones and tore our tissue, right before they made us receive them.

"We have babies because we want them to love us, to make us important, but they only make us tired and far and stinking of spit up because they're babies, not saviors. Their fathers leave us, sick of crap and sour milk, sweatpants and tears.

"But the babies need all of us, only there isn't anything left to give because we based our worth on the lowlifes who knocked us up and around."

-Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl

Lonely Woman

we are fatherless daughters
entering womanhood with only half our selves
worshipping the mystique
of masculinity

naked bodies flying
willingly
over the edge
of countless cliffs
praying the god of gravity
will grant us grace

you see us at parties
getting drunk on emptiness
dancing dirty with strangers
or worse - with men we know

we will do what we don't
to please our lovers
'cause this one could be
the one
our hearts hold...

we are lonely women
waiting for someone
to want us
wanting someone
to need us
needing
someone

-Kyesha N. Brown, Bum Rush the Page, defpoetryjam