I have survivor’s guilt. It’s survivor’s guilt. You are experiencing survivor’s guilt.
No, it is not.
It’s not survivor’s guilt when you feel off about you ‘making it’ and your family not.
It is not survivor’s guilt when you feel sick in your stomach that you have one foot in success and one foot in trying to figure out your family’s mess.
Why can’t you lift them out of this?
Why can’t they just…
STOP
Being so messy.
So wrong.
So guilty.
So easily captured by the rules and laws written surreptitiously to capture your own.
Survivor’s Guilt Is is Not
When the system was meant to oppress you and everyone like you
When you and those like you were thrown away as soon as you could suck
on Your mother’s tit
Full of nourishment
and bitterness
Survivor’s Guilt It Is Not
When the system is designed to embitter your mother
with back breaking work
with the stress of finances
with the stress of feeding you
with the stress of being carried away each time a siren is sung
A siren sings
Migra! Migra!
Weeeeooooo Weeeeeeoooooo!
Red lights
Blue Lights
Still make your insides cold
Arrest your body
As you realize
You have not survived
One foot in “success”
One foot in the mess
created by the system to pull you and those like you down
Down
Down
Until you drown
Almost
Yet bob up and find a way to peek
Step
Gingerly
then break into a thundering run
away
From survivors
A burden
by a system’s maker
to feel guilty
for living
existing
Guilt
is not yours
It’s not you that
Keeps you
in Guilt and Wonder
Why me?
When you could ask, instead
why this?
Change this
Susana Benavidez 