Part 1

I wanted what they had
I wanted to
Escape through wool coats
Coarse dusty yarns brushing my face
Brown soft cloth on my fingers
Crunch white powdery mothballs
Beneath my heavy laden feet
Chlorine filling my nose
Burning my mouth and throat
Clearing my mind
Lifting my shoulders

Push past

Leave
All that I am
Step into
Cold clean crisp snow

Push past

Wool coats
Into green firs

Push past

Dark stifling wardrobe
Into open crisp dusk

Why not me
Why only them
Couldn’t I go too
Wouldn’t I escape too
I can’t stay where I am
I need so badly
Wish hard enough
And I’d make it
I had to

Eyes closed
Stretch fingertips
Farther, farther
It would be there
It must
It promised so much
Just believe they said
And oh how I believed
I never wanted anything as much
And never since

Push past
Please
I’ll give anything
Just please

Hands hit the back wardrobe wall
Again
And again

Part 2: Dear Mr. Lewis

What a dirty cheat
To find it was just a story

To a child
Every word is alive
Every word truth
Inside
Building secret places
Golden rooms made of stories and promises
With wardrobe doors

Wardobes within wardrobes

How could you lie like that
To children
And to yourself

All the promises you made
Could not keep
And did not try to

The Great Faith
That had no faith in living

Believe
You said
And the walls will open

Believeing
Never made a safe place for me to hide
No matter how often I tried
Or how true I was
Or how hard and steadfast my faith
My abusers still found me

All believing got me
Was
Locked into the wardrobe
No hand to open the door
No back walls opening into paradise

Isn’t that what really happened to Susan?
Desperate to be grown up
With no more “funny games”
No more memories of locked forbidden places
Unobtainable golden rooms
Gone bile sour

Was Susan so tragic to lose heaven
Or could she just not live with it anymore
Ceaselessly searching dark wardrobes
Shut out
Denied
Hands hitting clawing scraping
Begging

Better to be awake
Eyes wide smarting
Than wishing hopelessly for something
That won’t ever come into your hands

Better to make promises
You can keep
Than ones you can’t forget
Or forgive

Better to not open the door
Turn away
And make life what you can
Live with

Better to make every moment
Something you wouldn’t escape from
If all the wardrobe back walls
Opened up
And sweet wild grasses
Rolled on and on
Beckoning

Take back your wardrobe Jack
Susan knew what she was doing
And finally
So do I

Part 3: Jennifer

No matter how hard I try
The cats won’t speak to me
Oh
Their looks speak volumes
Mostly in disgust
But a word?
Not one

My daughter believes
In talking pigs
And that luck dragons
Really can fly

She builds tents
Out of bed quilts
She fights evil dictators
With cardboard kitchen roll swords
And wins

When she is hurt
Only my kiss will cure
When she is lonely
Only a stuffed bear understands

My daughter sees a thousand, thousand worlds
In every room
And the air is thick with her dreaming

When the night mares come
On thundering hooves
She can catch them up in a spider’s web
Where they will hang til morning
When the dawn sun burns them up
So much fairy dust

And when I forget
And get lost
In that place between
Being too old for fairy tales
And not old enough
To believe in them again
Wipes her all away
And she is just a nuisance
Who should know better

I can see the wardrobe doors
That cover her eyes
Close
And I realise that
I am the Great Nothing
The White Witch
Stone knife in my hand

And all the promises I made myself
When I was small enough to believe
Gone
I stop
And make this one

I give it to my children
And pray to every god
(Aslan included)
that they never walk
Into the wardrobe
Arms outstretched
Desperate for a way out

1989-1995 (with edits along the way)

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