Two children came to me--
I murdered them both.
The crease in each skull matches this crowbar
like some women's shoes and handbag.
I know I will be tazed, arrested, tried, judged.
I'm a woman, I'm judged every day.
This will be worse, because it's kids.
One annoyed me with her need.
She was a Grand Canyon for the exhausted burro of my help to slip into, miles to the bottom.
The other annoyed me with his precociousness,
his earnestness, his busy unstoppable goodness and innocence.
Hate grew in my chakras like kudzu.
I swore like a sailor giving bloody birth to this curved iron child,
my spit and image, this crowbar I now cradle.
Two children came to me--
I murdered them both.
It will be demanded of me to be sorry, and I will do what I always do
when bewildered, cornered, angry, heartsick--
I will laugh involuntarily, unable to stop.
They will look at me with their puddly venomous eyes and say, "You bitch!"
I will wheeze and choke out "Yes! Yes I am!" laughing like a hyena,
and with the same bent-over, about-to-puke posture they drum out of you at finishing school, or die trying.
_________
for this.
Wow. This is one powerful write fren. We often wonder how a mother can kill their children, how they can drown them in a bathtub or cut their throats. We forget about the murdered children in our overwhelming need to pity the other children who die. This poem broke my heart.
ReplyDeleteYou have written the dark side of human nature, which is darker than many of us ever learn about. It is true, the need and the goodness are anathema to such dark souls - especially the goodness. The involuntary, choking laughter is very apt, and the idea that this person went to finishing school is an added macabre note that only you could imagine. Thank you for writing to my prompt, which is maybe not the clearest. But i am always happy when a person is sparked to write anything in response. Prompts are only jumping off places. Many of us wrote for decades without them. I admit, i am glad to be offered ideas, now that my imagination is apparently incarcerated. Smiles.
ReplyDeleteA different and powerful perspective, Shay.
ReplyDeleteWhat you save saves you -- and we're not taking any prisoners! It's a perfect poem,, not only in itself but in response to the challenge -- intoxicant with the pepper spray of rage this side of grief. Spot on and deadly true. You take a character defect and ride it like a burrow down the canyon's abyss in a single line. Sheesh. Wish Hedgey was around to applaud.
ReplyDeleteShe was a Grand Canyon for the exhausted burro of my help to slip into, miles to the bottom.
ReplyDeleteEvery mother has felt that, whether they admit it or not.
Ouch. Lady Liberty, or Susan Smith, or Medea--or all of the above?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the satire of this piece. The tone is terrifyingly psychotic but as a metaphor of current events it rings so true. Another notch in the male-female conflict without resolution belt.
ReplyDelete*Claps hands* Wish I could say more of what this made me feel--so many exquisite lines--I especially like the one about the long-suffering burro--beast of burden, piled so high with others' griefs and chores...and the crowbar metaphor--our pitiful weapons, how we murder the importuning selves within that are born without our understanding...I also read the one above this--exquisite.
ReplyDeletewhew. I'm mostly past wanting to kill the kids ~
ReplyDelete