Being Female

Waking up, I need to put my armour on.

Cracked and chipped I attempt to superglue the parts that are failing apart.

Waking up, I need to take deep laboured breaths.

Which honestly does little to quieten my anxious breathing.

I stand in front of the mirror repeating a prayer,

A mantra, as if I am casting a protection spell.

A cry for a peaceful place to dwell.

It goes like this: I am not your doormat,

This body that you have mistaken as yours is not yours to hold.

I am the sole owner of this property.

In simple English this body is MINE ALONE so back off!

It is not your personal punching bag,

And it was definitely never meant to be your frustration rag.

Waking up, I take a deep breath.

I look at my breastplate as if i just escaped death.

It  holds angry holes from where a father’s greedy eyes lasered through.

Who needs telepathy when your facial expression does little to hide 

the sickening fantasies of you grinding my bones into disposable powder?

Powder that becomes nothing but a by-product of your lust filled one sided pleasure which some 

how is seen as a measure of your man-hood past time leisure.

Waking up, I grip my blood-stained sword.

Evidence of the battles I’ve won but somehow feel like I have lost,

Because my sisters who should be celebrating our victory are claiming it was the “slutty outfit I wore which made me whore’

“ or that I cant handle a simple joke, so what it was a gentle hard poke... right?’”

So very quickly I learnt that maybe my idea of a ‘joke’ is alien to society the same way that the word respect is.

According to my dictionary, ‘joke’ doesn’t not reference to sexual violation or degrading.

It seems like in your ‘dick-shit-nary’ joke is a verb meaning enforcing your man-less dominance.

Attempting to prove that my “No, I’m not interested" does not exist in your lacking vocabulary.

Your version of a ‘joke’ is dissecting my self-esteem,

Stripping it bare in front of your friends so you can try smoothen the creases that my rejection 

created in your ego and pride.

Your version of a ‘joke’ is sexual humiliation that is mockery, because your sorry ass feels entitled 

to what doesn’t belong to it.

After a long day I returned and I strip off the heavy armour,

But not before checking the door is locked three times,

And rushing to secure my windows making 

sure that they closed shut from the inside,

Because in this world “too safe” doesn’t exist especially for girls and women.

I kneel by my bed post, and don’t get me wrong I am not religious,

But life has brought me to me knees too many times, so I figured if '  going down'is a requirement 

attached to being woman then let me go down to speak.

Let me speak into the universal council not as woman but as spirit because the stamp written 

silence is carved on women’s lips so that the skin still burns when she attempts to speak out.

I ask God:

If you made a woman’s body a temple then why do men greedily destroy her walls before the 

temple is fully built?

I ask the woman who came before me, whose spirit stand tall with no guilt in the universe as if 

freedom was only found after death :

If ‘woman’ is a blessing then how come I hold the title with such shame regretting my own 

breath? 

Somehow the word  female feels like chains,

And the word virgina has given me a life sentence to 

slavery's mark as if I'm Cain's.

Just tell me in which point in time, did being a woman become an unspoken crime?