Lady Poet

 

Who changed you, water lily, who betrayed

and left your leaves to sway half-drownëd here?

Your moon-dazed face is pale, night-sick, afraid.

Water lily so wounded, so austere.

You of many stems but a single face--

no voice at all except poems water-writ.

Who muddied the stars of your secret place,

and forced such a sorrowful alphabet?

________

A rispetto poem for What's Going On?--"The Dark" 

Music: the late Marianne Faithful Sad Lisa

How I Know

Mrs. Capgras isn't Mrs. Capgras.
Whoever she really is, she's very clever, right down to 
parading around the neigborhood with the young Capgras children.
I confronted her.
"You can't fool me," I said, 
and the nerve of her,
the brass, 
she wouldn't drop the pretense.
Pretty soon the children were crying and she and I were 
clutching and kicking
biting and screaming
right there at the entrance to the park. 

The police were called, of course.
Idiot neighbors,
credulous biddies,
believed her that she was Mrs. Capgras.
Off she went, pretending upset,
gushing crocodile tears as she herded those kids back up the street.
She--whoever she was--kept looking back over her shoulder 
with her flushed, 
fake Mrs. Capgras face. 
She even fooled the police, who scoffed at me
as if I were insisting that the earth is flat,
when all I did was to state the obvious fact--
Mrs Capgras isn't Mrs. Capgras.

My nerves are so frayed,
so jangled,
it really is a trial to be put through all of this,
fresh on the heels of Mr. Fregoli's machinations yesterday.
He conspired--yes he did--with every jane and johnny in the development
to leave me a nervous wreck,
and a laughingstock.
Everyone I met yesterday was wearing a Mr. Fregoli face,
talking Mr. Fregoli talk,
and plotting evil against me.
I wasn't fooled for a moment, but what a position it put me in! 
"Poor Samantha, she's gone quite crackers."

And now you.
You're in league with them, don't bother to deny it.
You Capgras, you Fregoli, you second-rate duplicate!
You changed, right after you bashed my head in
with the wooden bread keeper that used to sit on your counter.
I had said some things.
I had been angry, and hurt, and I said some unfortunate things.
I said them, and you cold cocked me
and began recruiting your doubles.
You, my girl, can be cold and dark and distant,
and fracture something of mine every blue moon,
but this is not you, 
whether anyone wants to hear the truth or not.
This is not you--
my heart would know.
________ 

for Fireblossom Friday "The Distorted Lens."

Process notes: Capgras delusion is a condition in which the sufferer believes that people around them are false dulpicates of who they seem to be. Fregoli delusion is a state in which the person believes that everyone they see is one particular person in disguise. Both can be the result of a head injury. Finally, domestic violence between female couples is an under-reported crime, and not uncommon.

Ravenous

"Hold you in his arms, yeah, you can feel his disease" --The Beatles

Here is your ideal lover,
restless beside you in bed,
skin alive with a traveling infestation.
Reach out.
Go ahead.
Embrace the one who writhes as he sleeps.

Here is your constant one,
with words as sweet as rot
leaking from cracked teeth that teem with larvae.
Kiss him.
Suck his infected tongue with your lips
Because he cannot harm you.

Here is your adored one's treasured heart
housing sickening vermin.
Never mind the pitch and yaw
Of whatever fills his discolored chest.
He can explain all that, like so many times before;
Bring in a team to identify exactly what he is.

Touch him.
Kiss him.
Sit beside him and listen to him break wetly apart,
and, out of kindness, try not to vomit too obviously.
He is not what you thought he was.
He is legion,
and it is himself he devours, not you. 
_________

For Skyflower Friday. Monsters.