the giving tree still weeps

I went to three different high schools
I was the weird one
I smoked cigarettes in the school basement
while talking to my abusive boyfriend 
on a payphone
trying to convince him
I was more than a hole
while I listened to the cheerleaders chant

those same cheerleaders asked me for my
diet tricks at impromptu parties at my apartment
my mother was never home
and my secret diet trick
was that I always had some asshole boyfriend
that wanted me to look like a porn star
I didn't have money to eat
and I wasn't hungry from debilitating depression

they giggled when I told them that
but I saw the fear in their eyes
when they realized
the darkness they would need to adopt
to become willowy and mysterious

while they got lied to in my mother's bed
by fake sainted high school football stars
I cleaned the house and wrote in my journal
about sad teenage girls getting abused

I scrubbed at my new tattoos
with a brillo pad
love is always tattooed 
when you are too young to 
know you are worth something
I poured water into the drunk girls
they had neglected in their search
for manhood
I held greasy heads as they puked
because they were not the chosen
ones to be pummeled by soon-to-be
potbellied, aging football players
that sold cars or insurance
or something that didn't include
the magnificence of youth

while I was alone in my own
teenage ineptitude
my young mother
tried to relive this horrible youth-hood
with some man that was doing the same
when all I could wonder is why
no one was welcoming death
I longed to chew applesauce
on a rickety deathbed
with such saggy flesh
I wouldn't be in fear 
of getting raped again and again
or leered at by old men

I didn't realize 
that twenty years later
I would see all the above as nothing,
that there would be worse,
that I would long to be seen again
even if it only meant
being leered at because I had
youth and belief

how silly it is that we strive to be wanted
when everyone wants what they can hurt.
what they can take
is what we have to lose
and it never seems enough
for them to want to take more

that story the giving tree always
made me weep
I stopped reading it to my child
because I couldn't bear her being
yet another one that treated me that way

she will gladly sit on my stump in a few years
and I will be okay
​it will still make me weep