by Brooke Palmer
WHEN I WAS 14 YEARS OLD, I, like many young-teenaged American girls, was seduced by the older “bad boy” and then spent two and a half of my high-school years in a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship in which I was controlled by a man four years older than me. He had a severe learning disability and was a convicted felon by the time he was 18 (for two years, I was the off-and-on baby prison girlfriend who drove every Sunday with his mother to the minimum-security state facility for all-day visits). He was a major drug abuser from a family that emulated working-class domestic violence.
Though I was raised to be a confident, strong female, and though I knew I was better than the situation I’d found myself in, the powers and pressures of first love, of first sexual experiences, and of the threats of a talented manipulator overpowered my good sense and the help that others tried to extend me at the time. I had become a good liar, to myself, to others, maintaining enough of my innocence and academic prowess amidst the bad influence and pressures of my so-called boyfriend that I maintained the façade of being mostly “okay,” mostly in control of my situation and mature enough for the relationship I was in. I know now that I was not okay, and that those two years between the ages of 14 and 16, being prime years in a human’s sexual development, caused a lot of damage to my later romantic-sexual self. And at the time, I was aware of the trouble I was in, but just didn’t know how to get out of it. Until he went to prison the second time, which was a pivotal three-month period during which I gained enough of my inner independence and strength back to dump his ass and never look back. His being placed on house arrest helped the matter because he was unable to come after me.
When I look back at the writings I had done from that time period, I can see the child and the young adult intertwined, yearning for freedom from the situation, naïve and yet wise. For the theme of social (in)justice, I have decided to share a series of poems I wrote my Freshmen year of high-school, when I was 14, when I was trying to comprehend the situation in which I had found myself stuck. My boyfriend, personified in this series as “Jimmy,” shows his multi-faceted dark and troubled humanity within these poems. And though there’s a little bit of hyperbole (my family never said Grace at the dinner table) and it’s from my extremely inexperienced 14-year old perspective, these poems and what they represent are still very meaningful to my life today. Though they were written in a childlike, simplistic, almost sing-song way, the poems are still powerful to me because they are so clearly filled with the basic themes of the realities that exist in our society. So now, 17 years later, I present to you my five-poem series:
“The Jimmy Poems”
JIMMY
JIMMY AND DAD
JIMMY AND HIS GIRLFRIEND
JIMMY AND HER PARENTS
JIMMY AND HIS PROBATION OFFICER
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