Scraps Beneath a Gum Tree

I’ve spent a fair amount of my life being told who and what I am.

Some of you will know me as Tabitha Lean, the name my mother gave me. 

The state calls me, Prisoner 177057.

Many of you will know me as an abolition activist, a writer, a poet, an artist.

A few of you will know me as a fraud, a criminal, a front page of a newspaper, a salacious headline.

Some of you will think of me as your friend, a comrade.

The latest name to be attached to me, came via an anonymous email, calling me a grifter, a con artist, a swindler - a fucking criminal mastermind.

I am all of those things, and none of them at the same time.

To be honest, I am nothing more than a bunch of bones, walking around in a skin suit. That’s all that any of us are. We’re just a tidy little collection of atoms all arranged in different configurations. And we are all just doing our bit to get through the day. To exist in this world, in these spaces and places that feel so harsh and hard and difficult.

And mostly, I don’t feel like I am made for this world. Not for the harshness of it anyway. I think I was made for something softer, something gentler. Something kinder, and something a lot more colourful.

Most days I feel battle weary. Like I am rubbing up against sandpaper all day. I certainly don’t feel powerful. I don’t feel like a monster. Or a spook beneath your bed. I don’t feel like I could make foundations shake or civilisations crumble. I don’t feel like I am a criminal mastermind. I don’t feel crafty, sly or sneaky. I’m not running a scheme, a scam, or have something shifty underway. Some days, I wish I did. Maybe then, I would have some power. Maybe then, my life would feel less like a dumpster fire. Maybe then there would be something possible on the horizon. Opportunity. Potential. A Future.

I’ve learnt there is no point lighting candles of hope, or holding onto flickers of possibility, because there is always someone there to snuff them out. A swift gust of cruelty. The cold breath of bureaucracy. A careless stomp of the boot.

I have grown to understand that the freedom that gnaws at the sinew holding my bones together will never see the light of day. It chews quietly, relentlessly, from within—a hunger that is never sated, a yearning that is never answered.

This world is not just hard—it is eroding. Every harsh email. Every time I’m scalded by the state, every ‘no’ spat at me like venom, every whispered ‘you can’t’, ‘you aren’t’, ‘you won’t’, ‘you mustn’t’, every time I am forced back into a box, shaped by their fears, not my dreams—I am stripped down, layer by layer, until I feel like the discarded carcass of a Woolworths BBQ chook picked clean by a family of five under a gum tree at a picnic.

I am scraps. Literal scraps. And still, people keep coming—knocking, pushing, prying, feeding off the pieces of me I can’t regrow.

Why won’t they just leave me the fuck alone?

And so, at night, in the midnight hours, when the world goes quiet and lays itself down to rest, I stay awake. I wonder. I stare up at the glistening stars and imagine what might have been.

What could I have done with this one, precious, bruised and battered life? Who could I have been? The poems I could have penned, the stories I might have lived, the wild, feral lovers I might have tasted.

I dream of foreign places I will never travel to, mountains I will never climb, rivers I will never swim in, people I will never meet. I don’t close my eyes to sleep because time feels too precious (besides, the tormentors, the ghosts and ghouls of my past visit me when I do). So, I stay awake. I write the stories in my head. I dream the lives I’ll never live. I sweep up the ash that is me and try—just try—to sculpt it into sweet poetry.

So, you see, I am not powerful. I am not a monster. I am not a threat. I am a bundle of nerves and broken dreams, empty promises and missed opportunities. I am just a tired, battered woman skidding toward half a century with very little to show for it but the scars that lay across my body like fault lines. I have no future mapped out, no scheme underway. I am not your danger.

So, you can fuck right off. Stay out of my inbox, my DMs and out of my life.

Give me my quiet days. Give me my quiet nights. Let me find the soft spaces. Let me rest this weary head. Let me taste a little peace. Let me hold, just for a moment, some small, ordinary love.

Because in the absence of a future, in the rubble of every door slammed shut, in the ruins of all I will never be— all that’s left to ask for is ordinary love.

Not the fireworks kind, not the movie script, not the saving grace— just a hand that doesn’t recoil, a voice that doesn’t demand an explanation, a softness I don’t have to earn.

Surely even a monster— if that’s what you need me to be—deserves some small, quiet love. Something warm to press against the cold. A place to lay this tired body down and not be afraid of the silence. Not be afraid of being seen.

Just… to be.