How to explain a woman, seen and not seen?
She is like light, wave and particle, hurtling pressure bursting through cavernous space, twinkle, twinkle, there are dreams up there colliding with hot beaches on liquefying planets, she rows through the mythic sea in a row boat with a gallon of peach martinis and CYANIDE muffins, hiding from the alarming gaze of a society built on the stilts of beauty, not even the sea gypsies on the rain wrecked shore would build a home so fragile.
She heaves, acid burned finger down the terrible throat, all the anger solidified in the chunks of vomit now spread across the toilet, mommy please, someone, can anyone hear her, the boys laughed when she walked by, they snickered in class, they wrote on the wall FAT BITCH, she crawls quickly into the maze brain, soldiers retreat, the bayonets skewer the gray stuff, move faster, quick, jump into the pit at the bottom of the craggy mountain.
She walks into a painting, where the chairs have hands and the hands have rings and the rings spin like a nucleus and puke onyx gossamer, she weeps in shadow, oil slicks her hair, are you pretty, pretty like blossoming hemlock, over here Socrates, you ugly fucker, talk to her, no one minds your bulbous nose, he belches pride, ask a question, ask her, looks at her spreading thighs on the feasting chair, LOSE WEIGHT, that’s not a question, it’s time for you to die.
She looks at the chairs and the chairs light a path and the path turns to ashes, and the ashes cough smoke that breaks the mirror and crumbles in splinters at her feet, she was happy there was no reflection, she wanted to peel away layers of lies caked on her eyes, the monarchs called her ugly and nothing she said or did was ever good, and all she wanted was to laugh, walk in green grass, and to be, you know, a girl without the poundage of SHAME.
She looks at magazines, the feel of murder fizzing, they are perfect, desired, mister handsy gropes them in dressing rooms, in offices, at parties where men gawk and sip lousy malt, judging, assigning numbers to women, if she is a ten she gets a condo, a convertible, diamonds that won’t sparkle because they absorb all the fear those women have of decay and cellulite, if she’s a three she gets to blow them in an alley or a dark car parked in a wretched lot.
She sits in a chair and steals a ring, pauses before the path, then plunges, like a falcon, arrow straight, into the Trench of WOE, and like a falcon she was proud and cool and fresh and though mortification was still sticky on her, she could no longer hear the monarchs, death thickens and knotts before her, she smiles with her hands cupping her face, a wan smile of someone who might seem at peace with the tricky, porous world, that place of pain.
She is at the bottom of the abyssal abyss, she sits in a chair at a table with the Cyclops of Castration and all the other chairs, blank - blank, and they feast on pickled plums, ricin cake, raspberry spirits, they feed their bellies, the troll of anger blistering their bottoms, and they burp power, she gorges without any guilt for the hideous Cyclops, in his DEFORMITY, saw her for who she is, with only one monstrous eye he saw her more clearly than anyone.
She is now put to bed where men do not want to bed her, shhh, she lays on the cold stone, unaware of being ugly, closed eyes, soft mouth, no prince will come, briar roses wilt, dahlias die, weeds erupt like reedy worms, the rat king nibbles her toes, her dreams let her waltz with love on every rock in the cosmos, she kisses purple skies, runs through water washed caves, sings to spiny bugs, rest, rest, she has not died, she will WAKE up when her soul mends.
She is a woman.