When her betrayal barged into your careful routines to take you prisoner.

There was no knocking on the door, no warning, no accommodation, no time to get dressed

Or time for your disbelief to catch up as the front door is left split in two,

 the home completely burned to the ground and contaminated with forever-chemicals.

Your therapist tells you this assault has been planned long ago, plotted in a CIA safe house,

Concealed in your childhood home,

When you were left crying out in the dark, protesting

Weakly from the crawl space of self-loathing that you are not the scapegoat or victim,

Not the ruse, not the person of interest, not the mark, not the shill, not the agitant,

Not the imposter, hiding in plain sight.

You never imagined your recurring nightmare would externalize into these restraints,

The chains, the locks of a familiar dread and grief because you loved someone.

And they abandoned you into this undisclosed location of the psyche. Intentionally.

The beloved’s betrayal confirms your complicity, sneers an ICE agent who has been given immunity.

But you were always the sensitive one, the heartfelt.

And you need to face that this is not a kidnapping, the criminals have zero ransom demands.

They won’t ever be arrested or even charged, however obsessively you document

The injuries. No one cares about the “disappeared.”

In the Upside-down you are an enemy combatant regardless of your intention

Or knowledge of the struggle. And claiming your ignorance will never get you consideration.

Blindness is not an excuse in this legalistic system, says the echoing voice that hates you

And sounds a lot like the shitty things your father thought about you though they didn’t

Always come out of his mouth but oozed from his skin like the stench of his temperament.

Your mother didn’t protect you. Even your siblings suspect you are accomplice, at least, to this isolation.

Your children never care to hear your excuses if they still tolerate you at all.

And everyone will believe the least authentic actors in this crime drama, believe the amateurs

Who love the spectacle and claim they have signed papers from the court of social media

That makes it your fault for what you didn’t know and for everything painful you will ever discover.