She is a metaphor to her husband
A cautionary tale to her children
Invisible to herself
She is a wandering ghost
to the house she is locked in
She has never been herself
She is somebody’s someone
Or something
Her place is in the kitchen
In the jewelry stores
In the gossip of other wives
She goes by somebody’s someone
Never herself
Her job is to serve
And to look pretty when needed
Her job is to be witty
at dinner parties
But voiceless
after the guests have left
She is her husband’s Barbie
with unnecessary functions
She lives in a haunted Barbie house
The company she can only find
are the ghosts before her
There is an old Chinese saying
That women beautify themselves
for the men they please
And she
Dedicates her life to do just that
She supports him silently by his side
For most of history
Anonymous was a woman
her name was therefore erased
Remembered only as
somebody’s someone
She is a glorious china vase
But inside it
nothing but air
She is the stunning wife
The loving mother
She has always been somebody’s someone
Never herself
I often wonder
if there is still a person in her
in daytime
She is nurturing and fun
Swallows down her pride
She does her part
She keeps her silence
Put on a disguise
Play the character on the stage
The stage
is the concrete home that she is chained to
The character
is what she thought a woman should only be
She puts her college degree behind
Her achievements before marriage
Becomes a hollow echo only she can hear
Reminding her of a person she vaguely recognizes
Her defiance came out at nights
The has been that hides inside
She tells her children what a woman she was
before their father
All the things she could have become
Instead of telling her kids bedtime stories
She cries and screams
Like a child searching for answers
The has been inside her
was shortly awaken
But broken this time
And yet to her children
She is the woman from the madhouse
She is nothing but a mockery
With her funny English accent
She is an embarrassment
She immigrated to a new land
with her husband
So the accent mocks her
Reminds her
of her no longer tangible free will
Yet he
Is a self-made man
An American Dream
Even with the accent present
He will never be put in the same place where she is
She is a cautionary tale
An unstable ticking bomb
Her son sees her
and defines women accordingly
Women are crazy, he says
Her daughter sees her
and swears not to be the same
To never be
an anonymous
Her husband is okay with her unstable mentality
He can tolerate the way
she treats the kids when no one is looking
As long as she looks pretty by his side
And doesn’t reach her hands out to the window
Yet when she hears the birds singing outside
And tries to chase back to its origin
When she stops cooking
And doesn’t do the laundry
As often as she did
He filed for a divorce
In his mind
Not cooking or doing the laundry for him
Means she has stopped caring for him
He sees the madhouse that
he and she cohabits in
But he thinks the madness comes from her
He never sought for a cause
Or a remedy for it
Never saved his kids from it
He is the observer and the perpetrator
And the children learned from their father
to see her
As the mad women
She is a cautionary tale
A metaphor
An unstable ticking bomb
She is somebody’s someone
Or something
Years after their divorce
She still can’t resist reaching her hands towards
her husband
she has lived inside the haunted house
She has been somebody’s someone
for too long to learn to separate herself
from someone else
To be the somebody in her own life
Years after their divorce
We still blame her for it
We blame the woman for her madness
For her failure in marriage
Just because she was somebody’s someone
Like how she was taught
We blame her for shrinking
Until the haunted house was too big
And she lost herself in it
We condemn her
for raising her kids in a madhouse
Locked them in the same cage with her
We ignore the oppression she inherited from her mother
And her mother’s mother
We fail to acknowledge that the madhouse
wasn’t the house we dwelled in
But the patriarchy she depended on
And she wasn’t crazy
She was just one of many
She is another ghost
She is chained to the haunted Barbie madhouse
Belongs to someone else
Somebody’s someone
Even when she is released from it
She still gravitates back inside
Every single time
To be somebody’s someone
Never herself
Butterfly Poetry 