Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun rides again.

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

The Skull In The Book

The skull in the book asks me what I'm reading.
We both know that he only wants to criticize.

The train rolls on, works looms.
I had hoped to get in a few pages, but no.
The skull in the book won't shut his pie hole.

I tell him it's about a woman
whose husband has a secret;
it's about a girl
who hears voices from her closet,
and it's about a cat
who stays on the stairs in the dark, watching.

The skull in the book scoffs. 
He wants spies and intrigue and sex.
"There is, Skully," I say. 
He frowns.

For a while I describe the scenery to him. 
He hasn't got eyes, but he has curiosity. 
He tells me to kiss him, he's a Prince.
"You wish."

At my stop, I tire of it all,
and discard my book with the skull in it. 
I can hear him, fuming inside the barrel with the coffee cups
and McMuffin wrappers.

I think I won't go to work.
I stand there for a second, stupid and a little afraid,
like a woman who wakes up not knowing where she is,
how she got there, what this strange body is
or why she's inside it, casting about for a clue.
________


6 comments:

  1. Your descriptions are always so amazing. I love the cat who sits in the dark, watching. And the way the woman feels on waking. That is SO the way i often feel. I felt i was inside this poem as i read. It doesnt get much better.

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  2. Those McMuffin wrappers are the exact device needed to bring this surrealism to a reality Snap.

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  3. This is the kind of out of body experience I can relate too. Talking skulls? Hell, yeah!

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  4. How disturbing to open one's book--surely the most confirmed place of private solace, and find there the thing one is trying to get away from, that dialogue in the head(or in this case, *of* the head) that annoys and teases and questions and leaves no peace. I love the details and richness of the book that has to be discarded like the messy results of a bad decision, too. The final sense of disorientation ends it on a perfect note of full-circle mental/emotional unrest--a place to which you always give us the best guided tours. Exceptionally fine poem, Shay--the roll continues and the bar floats skyward higher each time.

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  5. You've described what my daughter tells me depersonalization is like. This is an intriguing read - loved. la la Mosk

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  6. Skully wasn't enough? Clearly a skull with poor taste.

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Spirit, what do you wish to tell us?