Daily Distortion of Dumb-Fuck-Shittery

By Michelle Chan

-The following is a poem I wrote about the senseless injustice of CPS and the incredible, indelible strength of a mother’s love

The quiet in that night, the damp in that fluff, the slow humdrum in that buzz…

Those soggy remnants of days long gone but remembered and reminisced and ruminating again and again without respite.

I fight, in my flight, in my abandonment of all sensibility, in the AWOL of senselessness…

In the calm after the onset but before all hell breaks loose, I brace myself for a hell hard-fought, a hell with only two outcomes: damned and damndest.

This is me, one year into my child protection case. 

This is me, one month after reality hit that the system designated to protect children is corrupt.

This is me, after my brain short-circuited from the trauma, after I lost all concept of self only to pull it together, ever stronger, with the most steadfast of resolves…

The moments leading up to that incomprehensible moment when the judge’s gavel sealed my son’s prison sentence, for a crime I never committed, in a trial I had been deprived of, in the aftermath of loss and survival and briefest glimpse of freedom and rebirth…

Those moments were still as a Renaissance painting wet with paint but waiting to dry, still and yet threatening at any moment to self-destruct in a long smeared smudge of wasteful angst.

I walked into the San Francisco Superior Court at 400 McAllister street with the belief that the court would award me the victim of domestic violence, full custody. I had no way of preparing for what would come next, no way other than the warrior in me that had survived the past few years at the hand of my abuser, the father of my child.

I was strong but oh so weak at the same time. A cornucopia of brilliance and dysfunction and hope and baggage and what-ifs and why nots – all wrapped up in the hot mess of daily distorted dumb-fuck-shittery.

I miss my son, I miss my son, I miss my son.

Even worse and far more devastating is that my son misses me, my son misses me, my son misses me. 

My son is innocent. 

This is a fucked up world. There is no eloquent way to phrase it. 

The courts are corrupt.

CPS is corrupt.

My son, your son, their sons, all the sons and daughter and nieces and nephews are sent to slaughter, for profit, for personal and political gain, at the hands of the system charged with protecting them.

The courts are corrupt.

CPS is corrupt.

This world full of daily distortions of Dumb-Fuck-Shittery.