THE DREAM BEFORE THE DAWN

A Novel In Verse

About twenty years ago I was reading almost nothing but poetry, primarily Romantic-Era poetry, epic poetry, and narrative poetry. I especially loved novels-in-verse. Under the spell of all these, I wrote this, my own novel-in-verse. It is full of sex, violence, and bad language, was written more under the influence of Lord Byron than of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and is not for the faint of heart. You have been warned…

“…the dreams dreamt close to dawn are true…” The Inferno, Canto XXVI

INVOCATION

Beloved Muse,

Imbue this history

With wonderment, surprise, and mystery,

Honesty and truth. Help it to teach me,

Most ardently and humbly I beseech thee,

The meanings of the stories I have heard,

The awesome power of the written word,

No matter if it’s well-adorned or plain.

Endow my song with beauty, fill each strain

With melody and gracefulness of phrase.

And guide this pen of mine in other ways.

Good poetry can help us navigate

(Or at the very least illuminate --

Like following a torchlight through the woods)

Life’s many ifs and buts and shoulds and coulds.

So kindly help to keep my torchlight lit.

You told me once (I still remember it):

“There’s just one reason one should exercise

One’s writing gift: To make the neck hairs rise.”

Please help me keep that foremost in my mind

(And never wander through that forest blind).

CANTO I

Tom was an actor who seldom got work.

He felt like a loser, a deadbeat, a jerk.

Salesman, Streetcar, Menagerie, Grease!

Tom had auditioned for all of these.

The Iceman, Iguana,

Glengarry, Oleanna,

Speed-the-Plow,

Don’t Look Now,

Who’s Afraid, Six Degrees,

The Clouds by Aristophanes,

A Chorus Line,

The Days of Wine,

The Crucible, The Sad Café,

Whose Life Is It Anyway?

The Sunshine Boys, Sweeney Todd,

Children of a Lesser God,

Les Miz, The Wiz!

How to Succeed in Biz,

He sought a part at every casting call.

Sadly, though, he lost them all.

Determined to escape the fates

(No money, no prospects, no dates)

That bedeviled most failed actors

Tom considered many factors:

Giving up and finding work

Tending bar or as a clerk

In a shoe or in a clothing store,

Selling hotdogs by the score

From a little wheeled cart,

Or sweeping floors at Jumbo Mart,

Marrying some rich old broad,

Making porno flicks and baring his rod.

But these options weren’t appealing.

Tom was feeling

Blue and battered,

Needed work that really mattered,

Brought in money,

Paid the bills,

Milk and honey,

Fulfillment, thrills.

Tom read one day while browsing through the Times,

That men who’ve been convicted of great crimes

Are targeted by lovelorn gals

As soul mates, lovers, chums and pals.

It seems that slashers,

Stranglers, bashers,

And those men who love to bludgeon

Inspire not an ounce of dudgeon

In a certain sort of female,

Lonely gals who long for email,

Postcards, phone calls -- some connection

With a man who needs correction.

And that which truly drew Tom’s ire

Was the news that these gals most desire

The baddest of these hard-time losers

Not small-time crooks and wife abusers

Embezzlers and pension scammers,

But the worst our nation’s slammers

Have to offer: highway snipers, decapitators,

Bombers, butchers, the perpetrators

Of the era’s worst offenses,

Crimes repellent to one’s senses:

Schoolyard shooters, anthrax spreaders,

Patricides, matricides, child beheaders.

Those who’ve reached the height of fame

And now are known by some cool nickname --

“The Daylight Stalker,” “The Cheerleader Chiller,”

“The Stocking-Cap Rapist” “The Freeway Killer” –

Get stacks and stacks of cards and letters,

Valentines and handmade sweaters,

Chocolate truffles, packs of smokes,

All in a misguided effort to coax

These hardened cons so vile and hateful

Into a friendship with some gal who’s grateful

(Because of her looks or her extreme

Obesity or her low self-esteem)

To have any man at all pay her attention,

Even if he’s under government detention.

Take, for instance, the aforementioned killer

Who goes by the handle of The Cheerleader Chiller.

Harvey Prine’s his actual name

And the story of his dubious fame

Begins with an incident that took place

In high school, when, enraptured by the face

Of a cheerleading beauty named Misty Li

(An Asian princess, eyes like green tea),

He ignored his fears and summoned the gumption,

To approach her one day, saying, “Pardon my presumption,

But if you’ve no date for the Homecoming Dance

I wonder if you might give me a chance

To be your escort to the affair.

I could pick you up and drive you there

In my father’s flower-delivery van.

He’s a florist, you see, and if you’d like I can

Have him arrange a nice bouquet

For you to carry to the dance that day.

I know I’m no quarterback or fitness freak,

Just a lowly science and mathematics geek,

But nonetheless I’m confident

That this big upcoming school event

Will be a blast

With memories to last

Forever and a day

If you will just say

You’ll be my date and walk by my side

On the night we celebrate Spartan Pride

With a Homecoming Dance in the assembly hall,

Our high-school equivalent of the fancy dress ball

Where Prince Charming once squired Cinderella.

So whaddaya say, can I be the fella

Who squires our school’s most beautiful young miss

To that annual rite of romance and bliss?”

Misty Li, it may surprise you to hear,

Did not seem to find this proposal queer.

She looked at Harvey, up and down,

Noted the glasses, thick and round,

With tape that held the two halves in place,

The acne scattered across his face,

The pocket-protector he wore on his shirt,

The shoes that were always begrimed with dirt,

And, seemingly unbothered by any of these,

Said, “Sure, why not,” as cool as you please.

And then she smiled.

It was wild!

His heart began to race,

A flush infused his face.

“But…” said she, (he felt his blood congeal),

“A flower van surely is not ideal

For going to a fancy dance and back.

Some friends and I have leased a Cadillac –

A Limousine, I guess, is more exact –

It’s long and black and customized. In fact,

It’s got a wet bar and a movie screen,

A coffeemaker, and it seats fourteen.

And since the thing has already been leased,

Why not let us – we would all be pleased –

Pick you up at your house in the Limo.

Tell your dad that it was nice of him, oh

So generously to offer us the wheels

With which he satisfies his business deals,

But a vehicle long as a city block

Is a much better place to party and talk,

Or even engage” – she gave him a wink –

“In a little light petting. What do you think?”

Harvey tried to clear his throat

Which suddenly wore a constricting coat

Of cotton, or so it seemed to him.

His head grew faint, his vision dim,

And he feared he might soon play the fool

By fainting in front of the entire school.

But with great effort his composure

Was regained, and he said “Oh, sure.

I’d love to ride in the Limo with you.

I live on Wright Street, at 402.”

Came the night of the dance and Harvey was ready

Two hours early and feeling quite heady.

Wearing a double-breasted tux

His father had rented for seventy bucks,

He paced the house like a hungry tiger’ll

Pace its cage, and said to himself, “My girl

Is cute as a button and sweet as a lamb.

I cannot believe how lucky I am.”

He counted his blessings, he counted his money.

He was hoping later to take his honey

Out for a midnight snack with the gang

At some all-night diner where the cool kids hang.

Those two hours passed like twenty-four.

He paced till his feet were both blistered and sore.

At last, from the street, he heard a light rumbling,

And then to the window he hurried off, stumbling

Over the hassock and quite nearly tearing

The rental tuxedo that he was wearing.

Down at the curb a limo was parking

In which Harvey hoped he would soon be embarking.

He called to his father, “They’re here. Toodle-oo!”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,”

The old man yelled to his son quite loudly

As Harvey made his way down proudly

To the curb and the waiting limousine

That glistened in the streetlight sheen.

He had only just a few steps more

When suddenly a limo door

Popped open wide and out of it flew

A halfback, a safety, a lineman or two.

Biff Baxter grabbed him by the throat,

Deke Hickox pulled down Harvey’s coat,

Skitch and Mickey ripped off his slacks

And gave his butt some brutal whacks.

Then while these four held Harvey tight

Out stepped quarterback Bobby White.

He gave his knuckles a deafening crack

And slipped the jacket from his back.

He took off his cuff links and rolled up his sleeves

Over forearms as hard as bundled sheaves.

Then looking at Harvey with an evil grin

He threw a fist straight at his chin.

Harvey’s knees wobbled, then started to buckle

As Bobby delivered a second knuckle

Sandwich into Harvey’s face,

Thus triggering (Oh, the horrid disgrace!)

A loosening of Harvey’s bowel.

He crapped himself (the smell was foul!).

Down his legs and into his shoes

The wretched stuff began to ooze.

The only fortunate benefit

Of this sudden embarrassing eruption of shit

Was that it put an instant halt

To Bobby and company’s painful assault.

They grabbed their coats and prepared to leave.

Bobby rolled down and buttoned a sleeve.

Then he pointed a finger at Harvey’s chest,

And said, “Prine, I rather strongly suggest

That you never again so much as glance –

Much less invite to a homecoming dance –

A girl whom I have already chosen,

Or I swear to god I’ll punch your nose in.

That ‘date’ of yours, Miss Misty Li?

Get this straight – she belongs to me.

Her hair, her face, the way she talks,

Her legs, her tits, her tight little box,

The lips that taste like cherry wine –

Every part of her is mine.

And if you ever look her way,

I swear it will be your dying day.”

With that, at last, he turned to go.

Harvey hoped his ordeal was over, but no,

The sunroof of the limo slid back

And through the ever widening crack

Appeared, wearing gowns and strings of pearls,

Four of the schools most beautiful girls.

Each held a bag from Burger King,

From which she withdrew an onion ring,

Half-chewed burger, French fry, or Sprite

And flung it out into the night,

So that Harvey found he was being pelted

With ketchup packets and cheese half melted.

The sight of these girls so classily dressed

Flawlessly made up, elegantly tressed,

Hurling food from an idling car

Struck Harvey as almost comically bizarre.

And then came the evening’s biggest eye-popper.

Misty Li fired off a Double Whopper

That zinged like a well-thrown barroom dart

And hit the bull’s-eye of his heart.

Shortly thereafter the limo fled,

Leaving Harvey’s spirit dead.

After that incident, Harvey withdrew

From the science team and the chess club too.

His grades went down,

And all over town

He was treated like the plague.

His morale began to sag.

Not a single old friend to his house now came.

There seemed no end to his torment and shame.

When high school was over, no peace could he find,

For that evening of horror was etched in his mind.

He drifted from one dead-end job to the next,

Delivering pizza, transcribing text,

Cleaning hotel rooms, selling door-to-door

Encyclopedias, vacuums, magazines, and more.

But he couldn’t retain a single job.

He fought with employers and dressed like a slob.

Inside him a bonfire of hatred was burning

That made him incapable of ever returning

The love of another, or even a smile.

His heart was a dead thing, empty and vile,

Where nothing but anger and evil could dwell,

A small bloody fist that had reached up from hell.

In time, what remained of his sanity

Withered and died like an unwatered tree,

And he began haunting on nights in the fall

The places where high school gridders play ball.

He paid no attention to pass plays or punts.

He focused instead on the cheerleading stunts:

The pyramids, handstands, high kicks and splits.

He stared at the girls, their faces and tits,

And watched as they strutted and kicked up their heels,

Or exposed their silk panties while doing cartwheels.

His attention was riveted mostly upon

Those girls with surnames like Chin, Wu or Kwan.

Within a few minutes, halftime at the latest,

He’d have determined which one bore the greatest

Resemblance to his old high-school tormentor

The girl who acted so friendly but sent her

Boyfriend out of the limo to batter

Poor Harvey and loosen his fecal matter.

Then after the game he would follow behind her

As she went off to the car park to find her

Toyota or Honda or Mercedes-Benz.

And if she wasn’t surrounded by friends,

He’d come up upon her and grab her real tight

And drag her away in the dark of the night

To someplace secluded to murder and rape her.

Later on he’d return and then he would drape her

Over the crossbar of the football post

And leave her to hang there like some hideous ghost.

A half dozen times this crime of hate

He committed up and down the state.

The FBI and civic leaders

Advised all Asian-American cheerleaders

To temporarily take leave of their squads

Until this killer stopped beating the odds

And left behind some DNA

Or other clue that would lead the way

To this horrid crime spree’s resolution

A swift arrest and a prosecution.

The cops would comb each crime scene and then sic

Their lab nerds on it to search out forensic

Evidence invisible to human view,

But in the end, the nerds failed too.

It was Misty Li, believe it or not

Who finally saw that the killer got caught.

She had, by now, earned a degree

From Columbia in Psychology.

One day while reading about the case

Into her head popped the forgotten face

Of that zit-pocked kid who’d asked her once

To a high-school dance (Good god, what a dunce!).

She called up the Feds and told them her story

Leaving out such details as might detract from her glory.

She couldn’t remember Harvey’s name with precision

But a yearbook quickly supplied the omission.

The cops searched Harvey’s house for clues

And found a trove of panties and shoes,

Some tattered pompoms, a bloody knife –

Enough to send Harvey to prison for life.

Now you might believe that, because of his crimes,

Harvey’d be shunned by all women at all times,

But no sooner had he been tried and convicted

And a lifetime sentence upon him inflicted

Than legions of women to his jail cell

Sent cards and letters wishing him well,

Naked photos, offers to marry,

Poems of love, all sweet and airy

(“Ode to a Science Geek Spurned in His Youth,”

“To Harvey Prine, Seeker of Truth,”

“Homecoming Heartbreak: A Sonnet on Loss,”

“The Unrequited Lover,” and other dross).

Every day at mail call

Harvey was the luckiest prisoner of all:

Legal advice, holiday greetings,

Requests for private conjugal meetings,

Words of encouragement, words of support,

Offers to represent him in court,

To bear his children, to seek out and kill

Misty Li (“Say the word and I will!”),

The prosecutor, and even the judge

(“I’m sure you must bear him an awful grudge.”).

They sent him cookies and, on Valentine’s Day,

Boxes of chocolates, a lovely bouquet

(These gifts of course were confiscated

For fear they might be somehow tainted:

Laced with narcotics or concealing blades,

Lock picks, files, bombs, grenades.)

The point is, this colossal failure –

Now permanent ward of a federal jailor –

Who never once had dipped his wick

Into a girl whose pulse was quick,

Now found himself the target of

Daily requests for sexual love

From women who’d have never deigned

In the days before Harvey gained

Fame in such an awful way

To give him even the time of day,

Much less a smile, a kiss, or a fuck,

Or have offered on his dick to suck.

The irony of this was not missed

By Tom (remember him, our protagonist?)

Who, since graduating college

Had seldom had much carnal knowledge

Of womankind, the majority of which

Seemed interested only in the rich –

Lawyers, plastic surgery docs,

Arbitrageurs who manipulated stocks

Men who played with venture capital,

And swore they’d someday “damn sure have it all”:

The house in Maui on the beach

In a gated community the public couldn’t breach,

A flat in Paris, a condo in Aspen,

(“With a view that’ll leave all visitors gasping!”)

Lear Jets, yachts, vacations in Cannes.

Tom couldn’t even afford an insurance plan,

Much less a home or a fancy car

Like some rich and famous movie star.

But he was honest (relatively speaking),

He never engaged in pleasure-seeking

With drugs or other activities criminal

(Save for a few really quite minimal

Dalliances with marijuana,

And a single visit to a hooker named Shawna).

He worked hard (albeit for no pay)

Auditioning sometimes for three parts a day.

He belonged to a street theater troupe

And acted (for free) as the leader of the group,

Organizing public displays

Of Shakespeare (Tom loved all his plays)

Moliere, Ibsen, Shaw, Racine,

Performances which, sadly, were seen

By very few people and garnered no money

Except a few coins tossed just to be funny.

“If someday at a crowded audition

I took out a gun and ammunition

And fired bullets into the hearts

Of everyone there competing for parts,

Then turning to face the darkness where

The playwright cowered under his chair

And the producers scrambled for the exit door,

I fired a half a dozen shots more

Till everyone inside the hall

Who’d come to see this casting call

Lay dead and bloody on the ground

Emitting not a single sound,

And then I strolled to center stage

Put down my gun and stifled my rage

And raising my voice grandiloquently

Delivered Hamlet’s soliloquy,

Then looking all around me said,

‘I must be good. I’ve knocked them dead,’

After the cops had hauled me in

And the court shipped me off to the loony bin,

No doubt I’d be the recipient of

Numerous impassioned letters of love,

Candies, sweaters, smokes, and flowers

All of the bounty that usually showers

Down upon those hardcore men

Locked up in some federal pen

From women whose love is resolutely blind

To all but the dregs of humankind.”

Thus mused Tom as he crumpled to a ball

The newspaper and tossed it at the wall.

But even then an idea was forming,

And very soon his brain was storming.

He paced the room and stroked his chin,

Frequently breaking out in a grin,

Nodding his head, shouting, “Not bad!”

Then writing this latest thought down on a pad.

After a while he had formed a plan

That he thought might make him a wealthier man.

He’d gather all the available material

On a small handful of the famous serial

Killers most popular with lovelorn lasses,

Comb through all the masses and masses

Of information available on the net,

Crime scene reports, interviews, try to get

Familiar with each man’s history,

His habits, his schooling, his family,

And from this massive info compile

For each man a complete personality profile.

He’d learn their wants, their personal tics,

Each man’s gestures and conversational tricks.

He’d learn to mimic their manners and voices,

Become familiar with their personal choices

In cinema, sports, food, and drink,

Learn how they move and learn how they think.

He’d study their bodies for scars and tattoos,

Make note of their preference in clothing and shoes.

And with all of this info to memory committed

He’d seek out a costumer and have himself fitted

With wigs and jackets, caps and boots

Or even three-piece business suits,

Depending upon the past life career

Of the men that he was determined to mirror

Faithfully down to the smallest detail,

Including the flaws that had led them to jail.

And how exactly would he use this stuff

When he felt that he’d amassed enough?

Would he cobble up a new stage play,

Or four dramatic monologues, say?

No. To hell, thought Tom, with the stage.

It has brought me nothing but heartbreak and rage.

I need to make money or I’ll

Likely be bankrupt in a short while.

I’ll learn to portray these hideous guys

And then I am going to advertise

My talents in magazines, websites, and such

That cater to women who long to touch

And chat and snuggle up alongside

Some killer whose crimes are known worldwide.

“Spend a night with Harvey Prine!” his ads would scream

“With my help you can realize your dream,

And have a date with Freeway Killer or Subway Slayer,

Serial Child Murderer, or Shopping Mall Bullet Sprayer.

So convincing will my performance be

That while I’m there, I guarantee,

You’ll believe without the slightest doubt

Your favorite famous felon has been let out

And remanded by the authority

Of a judge into your custody.”

And so he undertook the laborious

Task of researching the four most notorious

Imprisoned killers in the nation who,

Like him, were white and slender too,

Roughly five-foot-nine or –ten,

Thirtysomething and (naturally) men.

Their histories he learned by heart.

He employed his knowledge of theater art

To mimic their look and general demeanor

To make himself slightly taller or leaner,

A bit on the bald side or slightly hairier,

More pathetic or much, much scarier.

He studied each man’s vocal timbre

Till his vocal chords grew ever more limber

And after a bit of practice he found

He could artfully imitate each man’s sound.

He placed his ads, he sat and he waited,

With hopes that were high and breath that was bated.

For a week or two the effort seemed to fail,

His phone didn’t ring, he received no mail.

But then one day, it finally occurred,

The phone on his bedside table whirred

And a voice on the other end of the line

Said, “I’d like a date with Harvey Prine.

Is that something you can do for me?
And by the way, what is your fee?”

A smile spread across Tom’s face

“Ah, yes,” he said, “you’ve called the right place.

I can get you a date with Harvey Prine,

He happens to be a specialty of mine.

The fee is one hundred dollars an hour

And I’ll do everything in my power

To make the experience worth it to you.

There’s just one thing that I won’t do:

Sex, I’m afraid, is not part of the plan.

I can kiss you and tell you that I am your man,

But sex for money the law won’t condone.

Thus, we must leave that one thing alone.

But just about anything else you want –

A trip to a movie or a restaurant,

An evening at home just watching TV –

All of those things are acceptable to me.

I’ve studied long and hard for this role,

I’ve captured Harvey both heart and soul

And I think by the end of evening, You’re

Going to feel absolutely sure

You got all that you paid me for,

If not, in fact, just a little bit more.”

This very first client was Ms. Anna Wright

And not exactly a beautiful sight:

Face like a mastiff, hideous clothes

Stretched over mountains of adipose.

They met at her condo, small, but a place full

Of art and décor surprisingly tasteful.

Tom’s first look at Anna gave him a jolt,

He wanted to turn around quickly and bolt

Back to his car, and drive fast away,

But he was flat broke and he needed the pay.

So he entered the condo and sat in a chair

And nervously ran a hand through his hair.

“Well now,” said Anna, and gave him a wink,

“Is there anything I can get you to drink?”

He wanted to ask if he might trouble

Her for a vodka martini – a double!

But he knew that she might be subtly trying

To determine if he had been honest or lying

When boasting to her about the quite vast

Knowledge of Harvey that he had amassed.

For, along with his other faults, Harvey Prine

Was a temperance man – no beer or wine

Or other form of alcohol

Ever passed his lips at all.

So Tom said that water suited him best,

And then Anna smiled: He’d passed her test.

They sat on the couch and between them there grew

A chilly silence for a moment or two.

But Tom was truly a gifted performer.

The atmosphere in the room grew warmer

As he began in detail to relate

The circumstances that had led him to hate

All cheerleading girls of Asian descent,

And how this regretful predicament

Had set him off on a killing spree

That gained him such notoriety.

Pretty soon Anna began to brush

Tears from her cheeks, but Tom said, “Hush,

My dearest one, do not cry for my sake.

Life may have dealt me a nasty break,

But just being here like this with you now

Makes all that I’ve been through seem worth it somehow.

For if I hadn’t committed those crimes,

Had my face not appeared a zillion times

In papers and magazines and on TV,

You might never have heard of me

And the two of us might not ever have met.

So I just can’t bring myself to regret

The things that helped to pave my way

To you and the joy we’ve shared today.

After that night, Anna was smitten,

By Love’s mosquito had she been bitten,

And Harvey hoped he might soon grow rich

From scratching Anna’s endless itch.

Every other week or so, he’d

Tend to Anna’s twisted need

To take a killer to her breast,

Provide him succor, kindness, rest.

They met at her place usually

And snuggled up on a cozy settee.

Sometimes they talked for hours on end

About Life, and Fate, the Need for a Friend.

To maximize his take-home pay,

Tom utilized a vast array

Of ploys to drag each date on and on,

Sometimes remaining till almost dawn.

He would bring over this or that dvd

To watch on Anna’s big-screen TV.

He took great care with the films he selected,

Making sure that they were somehow connected

With Harvey’s tortured history:

“Bring It On!” or “Play Misty For Me.”

Anna recommended the services of Tom

On a website – womenwhowait.com –

That catered to women who pined for men

Locked up in a state or federal pen.

Soon his phone was ringing off the hook.

Lonely women called him seeking to book

A romantic evening in the company

Of this or that criminal VIP.

To satisfy this increase in demand

His repertoire he worked hard to expand:
A man who murdered his pregnant young bride

And garnered headlines nationwide,

A minister who gunned down nine of his flock,

A pro-lifer who murdered an abortion doc,

A girl-scout slayer, a mafia big cheese –

Tom learned to imitate all of these.

Now every night for hours and hours

Tom earned good money for his acting powers.

But strangely his loneliness seemed to grow stronger

Even as his client list stretched longer and longer.

He snuggled each night with Anna or Mary

Or Lisa or Janie or Kathy or Carrie,

But none of these women was able to see

The man inside the man he was pretending to be.

As much as a person possibly can

Tom had become an invisible man,

Desired by many, unknown by all,

A shadow that passes across a wall,

A screen on which women’s dreams were projected,

A mirror where some other man was reflected.

More and more Tom was beginning to feel,

That success had made him, paradoxically, less real.

Like the star of a long running TV drama

Whose every sentence, word, and comma

By others for years have been scripted for him

Till his sense of self has grown blurry and dim.

He leased a few square feet of office space,

And hired to assist him with the place

A woman in her sixties, Mrs. Jones,

Who kept the books and answered the phones.

One day while Mrs. Jones was out to lunch

A small frisson, or maybe just a hunch,

Alerted Tom that he was not alone,

Which sudden knowledge chilled him to the bone.

He bolted upright from inside his small

Gray cubicle and stared across the wall.

And there at the reception desk he spied

A sight that rendered him at once tongue-tied.

A gorgeous woman, tall, with long black hair,

Was standing somewhat hesitantly there.

Her skin was like a just-poured glass of milk,

Her dress was black and of the finest silk.

Sheer hosiery her long slim legs enwrapped,

Her cheeks were red, as if they’d just been slapped.

Her eyes were like a well of sky-blue waters.

She was, in short, a pearl among Eve’s daughters.

Tom cleared his throat, said, “May I help you?

The hair salon’s next door, suite 102.

Or if you want aroma therapy,

The shop’s two doors away at 103.”

The goddess lifted her angelic chin,

Her lips thinned out into a nervous grin:

“I’m looking for the person whose profession’s

Giving lifelike criminal impressions

To private parties nurturing a yen

To share the company of dangerous men.

By any chance could he perhaps be you?
I mean, is that the kind of thing you do?

A friend of mine – I won’t reveal her name –

Informed me of your skill and growing fame.

She said – and it’s the reason why I’m here –

Your Harvey Prine impression’s without peer.

I guess it’s just a silly schoolgirl crush,

But Harvey’s story turns my heart to mush:
Rejected by the cutest girl he knew,

Beaten by her boyfriend and his crew,

Left naked and alone beside the street

A puddle of his waste around his feet,

While Misty Li and her companions fling

The remnants of a trip to Burger King

And splash his chest and hair and nose and eyes

With Chicken Tenders, Garden Salad, fries.

And ever since I first read of his plight

I’ve longed to spend, alone with him, one night,

So he could do with me the things, no doubt,

He dreamt, in teenage years, of trying out

On beautiful but heartless Misty Li.

In school I was very much like she –

I dated only handsome football stars,

Guys with lots of money, fancy cars,

Sons of privilege, blessed with looks and charm,

And big bazookas for a throwing arm.

I snubbed those nerdy boys with skinny necks

And faces always buried in scholarly texts,

And if by chance some boy like this grew bold

And walking home one day offered to hold

My books for me or just to chat a while

I’d turn on him my coolest little smile

And say with such aloofness that it froze

The poor pathetic wretch from head to toes:

‘I’m sorry but I do not choose to pass

The time with those outside my social class.’

Then off I’d walk and leave the boy behind,

And never pay his heartbreak any mind.

I was, in short, a cold and heartless bitch,

Who hung out with the popular and rich,

Who sucked up to her teachers and was thought

By parents to be rather a hot little shot:

Scholarly, accomplished, and refined,

Polite to all and always very kind.

They didn’t know because they hadn’t seen,

How often to my peers I could be mean,

For any classmate whom I found unpleasant,

I treated like a low and vile peasant.

And not until I went away to college

Was I to be confronted by the knowledge

Of just how harsh and painful it can be

To find yourself besnubbed by royalty.

In high school I had hubbed the social whirl,

I was by far the most admired girl.

Just like a queen I was lavishly petted,

Doted on and sometimes even feted.

Then off I went to university,

An east-coast school where no one knew of me,

A bastion of the nation’s upper crust,

Where social pedigree’s an absolute must.

While wandering the hallways there one nudges

The sons of senators and federal judges,

The daughters of ambassadors to Spain,

Germany, Albania, Bahrain.

In short, one is surrounded by relations

Of mighty folk from all the world’s nations.

And in these hallowed halls no one much cares

About a small-town girl whose daddy chairs

The boards of two inconsequential firms

And in the City Hall once served three terms

As Mayor of our humble little town,

A place without distinction or renown.

Such things may be impressive to the hicks

Who live, as I once did, out in the sticks,

But to a congresswoman’s son or daughter

My claims to fame were merely wisecrack fodder.

Now all at once my world was upside down,

I’d gone from regal queen to foolish clown.

My classmates found my small-town airs a hoot,

My manners quaint, my accent ‘oh, so cute!’

The boys I liked paid me no mind at all.

The girls, too, brushed by me in the hall.

I felt as though some cruel deity

Had cursed me with invisibility.

And it was in this period of time

I first heard of poor Harvey’s life of crime.

So is it any wonder then that I’d,

While reading of his story, cried and cried?

A few short months before I’d played the part

Of Misty Li, a bitch without a heart,

But now I was a misfit socially

And Harvey’s part much better suited me.

I understood his anguish and his pain,

I knew how it could drive someone insane

To spend long weary days and lonely nights

Ablaze with longing nobody requites

For friendship or for love or just a smile

To brighten up the darkness for a while.

It dawned on me just what a monstrous deed

I’d done each time, in high school, I’d decreed:

‘I’m sorry but I do not choose to pass

The time with those outside my social class.’

I’d snuffed the light of some poor human’s passion

To shield myself from seeming out of fashion.

Had Harvey Prine approached me back in school

No doubt I would have found him too uncool

For me to be seen hanging with, and said,

‘I think you are a creep. Now please drop dead.’

And then instead of killing Changs and Chos

When from his heart that murderous impulse rose

He might have targeted his killing spree

At girls who looked an awful lot like me.

This sudden insight hit me with the weight

Of thirty train cars loaded down with freight.

I realized just what a fool I’d been

And vowed to keep from being one again.

I dropped my plan to get an MBA

And spend my life pursuing higher pay.

Instead I opted to devote my time

(So what if I might never earn a dime?)

Pursuing a degree in English Lit.

This notion didn’t please my dad one bit.

He hoped one day to see his little girl

Aswim beside him in the corporate whirl.

But I was now determined to pursue

More lofty things than money can accrue.

Great thoughts expressed in poetry and prose

Were what I now aspired to compose.

To hell with Wall Street and its bulls and bears!

To Keats’ ‘Urn’ no stock or bond compares.

My father was appalled to hear this news

And begged me to amend my ‘commie views.’

But I stood steadfast and refused to budge.

At last my father shrugged and said, “I judge

This move of yours to be a grave mistake.

Do you know just how little writers make?

A poem may be fine and delicate

But how about a stock certificate?

Now there’s a piece of writing that’s sublime,

Especially when the Dow begins to climb.

I shook my head and begged to disagree:

‘Material things don’t mean that much to me.

I’d rather fill my head with Keats and Shelley.’

‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘but who will fill your belly?’

My dad, of course, gave in – he had no choice,

And I set out to find my writer’s voice.

My poetry progressed at first quite slowly,

My meter didn’t scan, my words rhymed poorly.

Eventually, however, I caught on.

The ways of rhyme on me began to dawn,

And as my rhyme and meter grew less ragged

My lines became more shapely, not so jagged.

My master’s thesis was a weighty tome

Consisting of one long and epic poem.

‘The West Port Murders’ it was called. Its basis

Was a spree of Scottish murder cases.

Way back in eighteen-hundred twenty-seven

Two men named Burke and Hare dispatched to heaven

Some Sixteen social misfits, maybe more

(A retard boy, some winos, and a whore)

And sold each fresh cadaver to a school

Where it became a valued teaching tool

With which, beneath an expert’s keen direction,

Student doctors learned to do dissection.

My poem took the side of Burke and Hare

And showed how poverty and bleak despair

Could cause two ordinary working men

To kill, and kill, and kill, and kill again.

My thesis was by far most critical

Of those who ran the teaching hospital,

The wealthy doctors, businessmen and such

Who paid the killers (but not very much)

For bodies that were useful in their courses

But never bothered questioning their sources.

Those doctors and their colleagues, rest assured,

Knew well how those dead bodies were procured,

But laws are written by and for the rich,

And so those doctors never had to twitch,

As Burke did, at a rope’s encircled end

(Hare spared himself by snitching on his friend).

This thesis earned for me an MFA.

And just like that I’d found my métier.

I gained acceptance from my peers at last,

My outcast days a relic of the past.

But I was now determined not to let

Myself those painful outcast years forget.

I swore I’d make myself a champion of

Those folks who lack companionship and love,

The ones who live upon society’s fringes

In whom great passion burns but never singes

Another person long enough to spark

The human fire that burns away the dark.

I sent my thesis to a publisher

And hoped that it might generate a stir,

But all I got response-wise was a note

Informing me that no one – here I’ll quote:

‘Has any wish to read about a Scot

Who ends up swinging from a hangman’s knot.

Such histories are just too dark and dreary.

The public of them has grown very weary.

You write quite well, we think your style’s fine,

But Scottish social history’s not our line.

Why not give us a modern murder tale?

And just to guarantee it doesn’t fail,

Be sure to fill the pages of your story

With lots of violence – make it very gory.’

That’s when the light bulb flashed above my head

And in my brain I heard a voice that said,

‘You’ve had a crush on Harvey Prine for years.

You’ve longed to soothe his breast and calm his fears

By lying down beside him and fulfilling

His dream of sleeping with some beauty willing

To give him all the love that Misty Li

Denied to him, thus triggering his spree.

Why not instead attempt to ease his woe

By writing up an epic poem to show,

In rhyming pairs of pentametric lines,

In language burnished till it brightly shines,

That Harvey’s not so awful after all,

That deep inside his heart he’s still that small

And nerdy boy who longed merely to squire

To the dance a girl they’d all admire,

A girl sweet and beautiful and good,

Alongside whom he’d feel as if he stood

Six-feet-three-inches, all of it well-toned,

Just like a marble god some artist honed,

And that his lone mistake was not to see

Just what a heartless bitch was Misty Li?’

By writing Harvey’s tale I believed

A bit of my own guilt might be relieved.

I’d snubbed while back in high school many guys.

Perhaps it might redeem me in their eyes

If now I penned a sympathetic tome

Comprising one long rhymed and metered poem

About the life of one poor tortured soul,

And showed the world how costly is the toll

When in their youth we shun and mock and tweak

The shy, the small, the homely, and the weak.

For two long years now I have racked my brain.

The effort’s nearly driven me insane.

I cannot seem to find the proper hook

For turning Harvey’s life into a book.

Should I write in first-person or in third?

Should I allow the facts to become blurred

With suppositions, guesses, and such means

Of dramatizing as inventing scenes?

Or should I adhere strictly to the facts,

Presenting to my readers just those acts

Well-documented by the FBI,

The courts and press reports. Is it a lie

To render dialog not word-for-word,

To make up things not known to have occurred,

Even if symbolically they feel

More true-to-life than what took place for real?

Such thoughts as these bedeviled me for months.

I nearly gave it up more times than once.

In desperation I sat down and wrote

To Harvey Prine a friendly little note

And asked if we might meet and have a chat

About his youth, his crimes, and all of that,

Or if by chance he opted to eschew

A face-to-face recorded interview,

Could we exchange some letters privately?

T’would help me with my book tremendously.

An answer soon arrived, to my surprise.

I opened it and read with eager eyes.

Imagine just how shocking it was when

I saw what Harvey’d written with his pen:

‘You spoiled little rich & pampered slut,

I wish you’d shove that book right up your butt.

You strike me as a hoity little bitch

Who thinks because she’s cute and Daddy’s rich

She’s got the right to mettle in affairs

That don’t concern her, and who also dares

To call herself a writer just because

She went to Yale and knows who Shakespeare was,

Who got good grades from every English prof

No doubt because she sucked the bastards off,

And now, convinced she’s Homer’s second coming,

Desires to wax on in prose mind-numbing

About the lost, the wretched, and the poor.

Well, fuck yourself, you skanky little whore!

I hope you die and get devoured by maggots.

Or in the asshole fucked by fifty faggots.

Thanks again for dropping me a line.

Your servant ever faithfully, H. Prine.’

I dropped the note and dried my eyes with tissues.

It seemed that Harvey still had anger issues.

I understood his feelings well enough.

His history with women had been rough.

But why take all that anger out on me?

I mean, it’s not as if I’m Misty Li.

Artistically I’d gone out on a limb

By even thinking of portraying him

With sympathy, compassion, and with style.

So why was his response to me so vile?

Emotionally I now was quite a wreck,

And everything I wrote just came out dreck.

I couldn’t seem to get out of my head

All those cruel words that Harvey’d said.

About the book I no more felt excited,

And yet I still believed that I must write it.

If writers never tried to do great things

All books would read like Clancy’s and like King’s,

Generic pabulum written for the horde

Of bovine readers easily made bored.

I swore no matter how much time it took

I’d persevere and write a brilliant book.

Alas, I made that vow six months ago

And still my book’s a tiny embryo.

I cannot make a go of it at all,

And like that proverb of the bathroom stall

About the man who’s rendered broken-hearted,

I too am having trouble getting started.

That’s why when of your services I heard

My heart began to flutter like a bird.

It dawned upon me with a sudden thrill

Just how your very rare and special skill

For imitating Harvey to a tee

Might possibly be used for curing me

Of the dreaded case of writer’s block

From which I suffer nearly ‘round the clock.

If I could spend alone with you one night

And give to Harvey raptures of delight

By letting him perform on me the kind

Of sexual acts that in his tortured mind

He’s longed, no doubt, forever to perform

Not on some murdered girl but a warm

And willing female with a beating pulse,

Lungs that still draw air, a voice that lulls

Him from his shell of anger, and two eyes

Not dead and dull, but comforting and wise –

In short, if I could give to him, through you,

The opportunity to finally do

On a young and willing girl’s frame

Quite nearly every sex act you can name,

Until, exhausted, he can do no more,

Until he’s poured out all he’s got to pour

Into the vessel of my woman’s flesh

(not dead and still, but vibrant, quick and fresh),

Well, then at last I’ll feel that I’ve repaid

The debt that in his mind so disarrayed

He seems to think the fairer sex has owed

To him since Misty Li caused to explode

His youthful innocence and peace of mind,

His sanity, his faith in womankind.

I’m hoping this symbolic sacrifice

By me of my sex organs will suffice

To wipe my conscience clear of any guilt

For all the tears that Harvey ever spilt

Because no living woman ever spread

Her legs for him while lying in a bed.

I’ll be the only girl who ever gave

To Harvey that one thing that all men crave,

And being free of guilt over his plight

I’ll have the peace of mind at last to write

That long and epic masterpiece of verse.

So will you help to rid me of the curse

Of writer’s block, so I can write my novel?

Oh, say you will and please don’t make me grovel.

I’d like to meet at my place around eight.

Does that work out for you? Is it too late?”

Poor Tom -- our hero, you remember him --

He felt his legs grow weak, his vision dim.

His throat was dry, his head was feeling sore.

He feared he might just pass out on the floor.

He plopped his weight down in an office chair

And ran his fingers through his long brown hair.

Then, Oh, my god, he thought, what blessed luck!

This goddess wants to pay me for a fuck!

He swallowed hard and tried to clear his throat,

Which seemed as if it wore a heavy coat

Of fur or felt or maybe just cheap cotton.

Whatever it might be, it tasted rotten.

“Ahem,” he said at last, and once again.

He feared he’d lost his voice for good, but then,

“Your offer is intriguing, I must say,”

He tossed out in a very casual way.

“It just so happens that tonight I’m free.”
He hesitated to discuss his fee.

But if he didn’t do so she might fear

He wasn’t serious and disappear.

“My standard fee’s one-hundred bucks per hour.

For that amount I’ll do all in my power

To make the evening memorable for you,

And do whatever you request me to.”

He didn’t make his customary sounds

About how certain acts are out of bounds.

And this was not the only move he made

To held increase the odds that he’d get laid.

While filling out her contract on the screen,

He secretly wiped out clause seventeen:

The parties to this contract stipulate

That they shall not attempt to fornicate,

And further that this document enjoins

The fondling of one another’s loins.

She signed her name upon the dotted line

In handwriting both elegant and fine.

It spelled out with fluidity and grace

A name that was as lovely as her face:

Miss Annabelle Miranda Everheart

Each syllable a tasty little part

Of some dessert that thrilled both tongue and eye.

He couldn’t wait to eat the whole damn pie.

“It’s signed and sealed,” she whispered and returned

The contract to him. In her eyes there burned

Such fire that it made his limbs all quivery.

“Now all that’s left to do is the delivery.”

Poor Tom said nothing, for he was afraid

His words might cause his thoughts to be betrayed.

“I hope that you’ll take cash,” she said and took

Five hundred dollars from her pocketbook.

“I wish to leave no trail that connects

With credit card receipts and cancelled checks

Myself to you and this queer trade of yours.

I mean no disrespect to you, of course,

But Reputation is a fickle dame,

And what we’re doing could destroy my name.”

“That’s fine,” said Tom, “I perfectly agree.

Some things are better done in secrecy.

Now, give me your address and let me know

Just how you’d like this date of ours to go.”

Miss Everheart presented him a smile

And said to Tom, “That’s good. I like your style:

It’s very businesslike, no wasted chat.

You’re to-the-point, succinct, and all of that.

Now listen closely to what I propose

And tell me if you like the plan I chose.

I think that for tonight we should pretend

You’ve broken out of jail and must spend

Some hours lying low and out of sight.

While running through a field you see a light

And follow it until at last you come

To Oak Tree Ridge, a condominium.

The light’s affixed above a deck and soon it

Directs you to the back door of my unit.

It’s number 106, way in the back,

You peek into a window and see black.

Assuming that the occupant’s asleep,

You pry apart the window and you creep

Inside without a peep and look around.

From somewhere down the hallway comes a sound.

It’s me, I’m in the shower, rinsing off.

You sit down on the carpet and you doff

Your prison shoes and socks, then in bare feet

You slip into the bathroom where we meet

As I am stepping naked from the shower.

You slap your hand across my mouth and glower.

You tell me that you’ll blow my ass away

If I don’t do exactly what you say.

Bewildered and afraid, I nod my head.

You lead me from the bathroom to my bed.

You tell me to lie down, and I comply.

My left leg with some hosiery you tie

Unto a bedpost. When it’s knotted tight,

You leave that leg and start to tie the right.

But while you’re busy working on my leg

I say to you -- in fact I start to beg:

‘Oh, god, I’m urging you to please desist.

I promise you that I will not resist

A single thing you try to do to me.

If you’ll just leave my wrists and ankles free

And not stop up my mouth with packing tape,

I swear to you I won’t resist this rape.’

The boldness of this statement is the cause

Of a sudden unexpected pause

In your actions, during which we lock

Our eyes upon each other while the clock

Tick-tocks away some seconds on the wall.

Then finally you crumple to a ball

And toss aside the pair of panty hose.

There’s something in my eyes which clearly shows

That you can trust me not to run away

That I’ll agree to anything you say.

You settle back, we talk, I draw you out.

I ask about your childhood and about

Your hopes, your dreams, your needs, your wants, your fears.

You spill your guts, along with many tears.

So that I might appreciate the whole

Sad tale of your life, you bare your soul,

By spelling out for me your many woes.

And while you talk, your anger slowly goes,

Until at last you’ve talked it all away.

At which point to your troubled boy I play

The role of loving girlfriend who lets

Her naked body pay off all the debts

That womankind has owed you since the night

That Misty Li first robbed you of delight,

A deficit that grew and grew until,

Confused, you thought perhaps you’d rape and kill

(Alas, not in that order, as we know)

As recompense for what we women owe.

But all you gained out of that deadly spree

Was guilt and fear and loss of liberty.

And now laid out before you like a check

Made out to you, and wearing not a speck

Of clothing, I repay with yielding lips

Both fore and aft, with breasts and thrusting hips,

Embracing arms and legs, a supple tongue

Tenfold what you’ve been due since you were young.

The details of tonight’s debauchery

I think it best – I’m sure you will agree –

We not determine too far in advance

But leave to whim and mood and fate and chance.

Since it’s your line of work I think it wise

That you should be allowed to improvise

The acts of sex that Harvey does to me.

Positions, points of entry, and degree

Of kinkiness -- I leave it up to you

To figure out what Harvey Prine would do

If during an escape he chanced to find

A girl who was lovely, bold, and kind.

Feel free to treat me tenderly or mean,

To shave my snatchbox schoolgirl clean,

To penetrate me anally for hours,

Or rain upon me many golden showers.”

On hearing this, Tom’s throat grew very dry.

He lacked the spit to offer a reply.

He managed, though, to smile and nod his head

In mute assent to everything she said.

“There’s one last thing,” she added, “listen close.

I’ll leave a long screwdriver by the hose

That’s coiled up beside the back porch door.

You’ll need this implement, and nothing more,

To separate the window from the frame,

And later on to reinsert the same.”

And then, like some enchantress from a fable,

She disappeared before poor Tom was able

To muster up the strength to say good-bye.

He merely sat and watched and heaved a sigh.

CANTO II

That afternoon Tom visited a store

That sold the kinds of costumes actors wore

On stage, and movie screens, and on TV

When playing doctor, nurse, or EMT,

A doughboy, scientist, or Catholic priest,

A space commander, or an alien beast.

He bought himself a set of prison blues,

A pair of cheap, black prison-issued shoes,

A gun he might have stolen from a guard

Just before he bolted from the yard

(It fired blanks but nonetheless looked real:

High-impact grips and phosphate-coated steel),

A knife that oozed fake blood from out its blade,

And other staples of the bad-guy trade.

He took these home and started to prepare

The criminal ensemble he would wear

That night when at Miss Everheart’s he played

The scene where Harvey Prine at last gets laid.

By seven he was dressed and set to go,

All ready to put on his one-man show.

He shoved the gun into his pants with care,

Not eager to shoot off a blank down there.

He grabbed some condoms from a bathroom drawer.

Then, with a shrug, he grabbed a couple more.

He shoved these in the pockets of his pants

Then raised his eyes to give just one more glance

Into the mirror fixed above the sink.

“You lucky dog,” he said, and gave a wink.

He stepped outside and sauntered to his car.

Miss Everheart’s abode was not too far.

While driving he took care not to exceed

The legally permitted rate of speed.

If stopped by the police he’d be hard-pressed

To justify the way that he was dressed:

The shirt on which a number had been stenciled,

The lip on which Prine’s moustache now was penciled,

The ski mask that lay crumpled on the seat

Despite the nearly record-breaking heat,

The pistol that was poking at his thigh –

These things were bound to catch a lawman’s eye.

He found Oak Ridge Estates and parked his car

Outside the complex but not very far.

He did some final prep work and he chose

To leave behind the knife and mask and those

Props that weren’t specifically required

To do the job for which he had been hired.

He slipped out of the car and stealthily

Approached the greenbelt round the property.

Reluctantly he trod into this mass

Of thorny bushes, swampy ground, sedge grass.

He forged ahead though scraped by nettled sticks

And came at last to unit 106.

He left the swamp and found a porch that jibed

Exactly with what Annabelle’d described:

The coiled hose, the screwdriver, the light,

The window that reflected back the night.

He stretched his hand and took the tool in it,

And had the window out in but a minute.

He climbed inside and with a steady pace

He crept along with nimbleness and grace

Derived from many years of grueling sessions

At studios that offered dancing lessons.

In the hallway he sat down and bared his feet.

From the bathroom came a sound like windblown sleet –

Presumably the water in the shower.

It stopped and then he knew that zero hour

Had arrived and it was time to do his job.

With anxious hand he reached and grabbed the knob,

Then with a mighty thrust he opened wide

The bathroom door and pushed his way inside.

Ms. Everheart was naked, glistening wet,

About as lovely as a girl can get.

Graceful curves, slender limbs, perfect skin –

He longed to spread her legs and dive right in.

She opened up her mouth and gave a yelp

As if she were about to call for help.

He stopped her with his hand and then he said,

“One word from you and I’ll blow off your head.”

He reached down to his waist until he felt

The gun that he had tucked into his belt.

He pulled it free and held it to her breast.

He felt her heartbeat pounding in her chest.

He rubbed his pistol barrel on her nipple.

Her flesh responded with a sudden ripple.

He thought it was a signal of delight,

Although her face retained a look of fright.

My god, he wondered, who’s the actor here?

Her face is like a mask of primal fear.

She seems the very picture of alarm,

As if she truly thinks I’ll do her harm.

He dragged her to the bedroom down the hall

And threw her on the bed, her legs asprawl,

Her still-wet hair like seaweed on her face,

Her breasts concealed in her arms’ embrace.

Inside a nearby dresser’s topmost drawer

He found five pairs of nylons, maybe more.

He grabbed a pair and then he grabbed her leg.

“Oh, please don’t hurt me,” she began to beg.

“Shut up or I will fuck you till you’re dead.”

It startled him, the way those words were said,

All harsh and brutal, as if they had come

Not from his own persona, no, but from

Some dark tormented fiend he’d unaware

Been harboring for years in some black lair

Concealed deep in his subconscious brain,

Who only now had loosened from its chain.

He feared perhaps he’d ceded all control

Of his actions to this evil soul.

To reassure himself this wasn’t so

He spoke again, this time more soft and low.

“Keep still. Do not resist. You’ll meet no harm

If you just let me bind each leg and arm

And satisfy my prison-repressed need

To fill a woman’s insides with my seed.

You see, I have for years been locked away

Inside a place where all the sex is gay

Or self-pollution of some dreary form,

And never do we get the carnal norm:

One man upon one woman in a bed,

Toe-to-toe, chest-to-chest, and head-to-head.

For years I’ve had one dream, and here’s the jist:

To come not in some hairy ass or fist

But into some young naked woman who

Is beautiful and sexy just like you.

All right, I’ve tied one limb. If you’ll keep still

Until I’ve tied them all and had my fill

Of sexual release upon your person

I guarantee you’ll suffer nothing worse than

A bruise or two, a bite, perhaps a hickey,

And thighs and hair and face a little sticky.

Just give me my one hour of delight

And then I’ll disappear into the night.

I’ll leave you gagged and bound but otherwise

Unhurt. You’ll wriggle free before sunrise.

Then go ahead and dial nine, one, one

And tell the cops what Harvey Prine has done.

By then it will not matter what you say.

They’re after me already, any way.”

This she greeted with a hopeful smile.

A silence grew between them for a while.

A moment passed, and then she finally broke

The silence with these words she softly spoke:

“You have no need to fear I’ll scream and shout

Or run off to the cops to rat you out.

I know who you are and how you’ve suffered.

From newspaper reports and all the stuff heard

On radio and tabloid TV shows,

Just about the whole wide world knows

The story of how Misty Li once toyed

Around with your poor heart and then destroyed

Your innocence, your faith in womankind,

Until at last you went out of your mind

And killed a bunch of Asian girls for spite,

Then draped them in the middle of the night

From goal posts where they dangled way up high

Like laundry hung by moonlight out to dry.

I’ve heard it all and still my sympathy

Remains with you and not with Misty Li.

You needn’t tie my legs and arms with scanties

Lifted from the drawer that stores my panties.

Just lock the door, then come back and untie me.

If you’ll do these two things to satisfy me,

The moment that my leg has been untied

I’ll do my best to keep you satisfied.

This bed we’ll make a real slow boat to China

Where with nimble tongue, soft hands, vagina,

I’ll caulk your timbers, haul aboard your dinghy

Come avast your poop deck, swab your thingy.

All these things I’ll do for you and more.

You’ll hope we never reach that Chinese shore.”

Compliantly Tom did as he was told.

He reached out for the doorknob and took hold.

He shut the door and locked the knob in place.

When he turned back, confusion creased his face.

A drawer was open in the bedside stand.

A gun was clenched in Annabelle’s right hand.

Uncertainly, Tom cracked a smile and quipped:

“It looks as if somebody’s gone off script.”

Said Annabelle, all business now, “Sit there,”

And pointed with her pistol to a chair

Which sat against a wall beside the bed.

Tom walked to it, sat down, and cocked his head.

OK, he thought, if it’s improvisation

She wants tonight, there’ll be no hesitation

From me, for it’s a specialty of mine.

I’ve lots of practice playing Harvey Prine.

He raised his gun and pointed at her heart.

“I’ve killed six people, bitch, it’s just not smart

To think that shaky hand of yours can fire

A pistol with the skill it will require

To shoot me dead before I shoot you back.

But if you wish, go on and take a crack.

I’m guessing that you’ll only end up hitting

A spot that’s several feet from where I’m sitting.

You’ll put a bullet hole into the wall,

The recoil will cause your gun to fall,

At which point I will shoot you in the head

And still go on to rape you when you’re dead.

Why take a stupid chance like that when I’ve

Already sworn I’ll leave you here alive

As soon as I have scattered all my seeds

And taken care of my erotic needs?”

“Shut up, you stupid fuck, and cut the crap.

Can’t you see you’ve walked into a trap?

Your gun, no doubt, is just some silly prop.

My gun’s a semi-auto; it can drop

A rapist dead with just a single squeeze

And fill him with more holes than fine Swiss cheese.

What’s more, you need no longer play the role.

Of Harvey Prine. You’re now just plain Tom Cole.

It’s you I wanted here, not Harvey Prine.

And now you’re going to hear a tale of mine”

“A story? Great! I love ‘em. Let ‘er rip!

I’ve always been a fan of -- ”

“Bite your lip!

Your role right now’s to listen, not to speak.

My patience with you’s growing rather weak.

Now sit back in that chair and lend an ear.

This yarn might be the last you ever hear.

All that stuff I said about my youth

This afternoon was miles from the truth.

My dad was never mayor. We weren’t rich.

I never was a spoiled little bitch.

My family’s working-class, we’re not elites,

Nor intellectuals or snooty aesthetes.

Because of this the high school I attended

Had courses that were generally intended

To make of us good service-sector cogs,

The modern kin of navvies, coolies, wogs,

Who work for others while they wear the fetters

Fitted for them by their social betters.

We studied basic English and, it’s true,

A smattering of social science too,

A bit of history, a little math,

But mainly we were put upon a path

Intended to direct us to the door

Of some garage or Wal-Mart superstore,

The showroom of an automotive shop,

A hair salon, an all-nite burger stop,

A Jiffy-Lube, a mini-mart, a Sears,

A Jamba Juice, a place that sells brassieres

And other kinds of sexy lingerie,

REI, A&P, CompUSA.

In short, they taught us all we’d need to know

To tune up cars or mend a radio,

Rehem a dress, fry up a piece of meat,

Keep other people’s houses nice and neat,

Or stand behind a counter shouting, Nex’!

While working at the local multiplex.

I longed for something better, something more

Than working at a giant discount store.

I wanted to prepare myself for college

But knew that I was lacking crucial knowledge.

The month before my sophomore year began

I came up with a self-improvement plan

I hoped might make me smarter than I was

And help enhance my fitness some, because

At that time I was quite a little chub.

And so I joined a local girls’ club

Where volleyball, ping pong, and basketball

Were played inside a recreation hall,

And classes were available for those

Who longed to write in poetry or prose,

Or play a song on keyboard or guitar,

To master chess, speak French, paint like Renoir –

All these things and more a girl could do

So long as she was motivated to.

I signed right up and quickly set about

Making myself brighter and less stout.

Outside the gym, upon the clubhouse grounds

I ran around for hours, shedding pounds,

While playing halfback on a soccer team,

Which boosted my morale and self-esteem.

To polish up my intellect and wit

I asked if I might study English lit.

A counselor then paired me with a tutor

Who couldn’t possibly have been much cuter.

An Asian girl, her name was Soon-Li Pai,

And older just by eighteen months than I.

But god she was so smart and so refined,

Possessed of all the things for which I pined:
Dignity, intelligence, and grace

And such a stunning loveliness of face.

A stand-out student at a preparatory

Academy that groomed rich kids for glory

In colleges like Princeton, Harvard, Yale –

Higher education’s Holy Grail.

The god of luck was smiling down on me

The day that counselor paired me with Soon-Li.

We met three afternoons a week at four

And studied for an hour, maybe more.

Because it was a specialty of hers,

We focused on Romantic English verse.

Lord Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Shelley, Clare –

Their words were always ringing in the air.

Felicia Hemans, Blake and Keats and Burns –

We spoke aloud their poetry in turns.

She taught me how to read and to recite

All types of lines, and even to indite

A few short modest verses of my own.

I learned about sight rhyme and homophone,

I also learned trochaic substitution

And what they call imperfect resolution,

Adjacent vowel elision, euphony,

Cacemphaton, enargia, and syzygy,

Internal falling consonance, and fescennine

(which grew to be a favorite of mine).

At first my own attempts to versify

Like Byron, Keats, and Shelley went awry.

My rhymes were weak my meter baggy, loose,

Like something from a third-rate Dr. Seuss.

But Soon-Li slowly educated me.

She taught me metaphor and simile,

A lot of hoary terms like ‘hoar’ and ‘hame,’

The diff’rences ‘tween words that seemed the same:

Forbad, forsake, forsooth, forfend, fordo,

Perchance, perforce, and peradventure, too.

My vocabulary soon became replete

With ‘lovely poet-words grown obsolete

Which will not leave off singing’ (that’s E.B.

Browning in her great Aurora Leigh).

I learned to write ‘benighted,’ ‘moil,’ ‘misprize’

Where most use ‘unenlightened,’ ‘toil,’ ‘despise.’

‘Hymeneal,’ ‘eremite,’ ‘demesne,’ ‘certes’ –

She taught me to pronounce each one of these.

Old words upon which others often slipped

Now from my tongue most elegantly tripped.

We dropped the girls club and formed a new

More private club whose membership was two.

We called it Albion’s Daughters in a nod

To William Blake’s fantastical and odd

The Visions of the Daughters of Albion,

In which a violent fiend named Bromion

Assaults and rapes the ‘soft-souled’ girl Oothoon.

This allegory posits that quite soon

America will show the world the way

Into a world where hatred is passé.

Soon-Li and I both loved this allegory,

And thus we named our club after the story.

Our bond by now had blossomed well beyond

The ordinary student-teacher bond,

For we were bound in spirit, heart, and mind.

Our lives were now completely intertwined.

We talked upon the phone till late at night.

Weekends, we rarely left each other’s sight.

Through city parks and crowded shopping malls,

Downtown plazas, sidewalk vendors’ stalls,

Together we would wander and discuss

The poems that most fascinated us,

Like Rosalind and Helen, The Corsair,

John Keats’ On seeing a lock of Milton’s hair,

Sappho and Phaon, The Storm-Beat Maid,

On The Inhumanity of the Slave Trade,

The Banks o’ Doon, The Echoing Green,

Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine,

The Songs of Innocence, Surprised by Joy,

I Loved the Jocund Dance, The Idiot Boy,’

Lift Not the Painted Veil, Lord Ullin’s Daughter,

The Dreaming Child, To The River Otter,

Gertrude of Wyoming, Three Years She Grew,

To H.C. Six Years Old, The Baby’s Debut,

The Lime-Tree Bower, Ah! Sun-Flower,

Milton, Thou Shouldst Be Living At This Hour,

The Mask of Anarchy, The Indian Bride,

To Death and Dainty Terms for Fratricide,

My Arab Steed, When Maggy Gangs Away,

Lines Written Between Dover and Calais,

Crazy Kate, To Jane: A Recollection,

Bright Star, Stanzas Written In Dejection,

The Clod and the Pebble, The Faithless Knight

The Lamb, She Was A Phantom of Delight,

A Summer Evening’s Meditation,

I Come in Self-Annihilation,

Kubla Khan, St. James’s Phenomenon,

Don Juan and on and on and on and on.

Too soon our summer’s idyll had to end.

By now she was my best and only friend.

But she went to a private school and I

Was still enrolled at Corporate Cogwheel High.

Most weekdays after school I was free.

But that was not the case for dear Soon-Li.

Activities of various odd sorts –

Cheerleading for several school sports,

Dance committees, student council sessions,

Private Japanese and oboe lessons –

Monopolized her weekday afternoons.

And just as poor Medora often moons

For her Corsair in Byron’s classic poem,

So too did I go moping round my home

Unleashing curses at the cruel fate

That parted me so often from my mate.

But weekends were a different cup of tea.

No curses or repining then for me.

Each Saturday at nine we would begin

Our day with breakfast at the Boar’s Head Inn,

Which catered to the local anglophile

With kippers, bangers, scones, and camomile,

Shepherd’s pie, clotted cream, and spotted dick,

Toad-in-the-hole, tripe, and jellied eels (ick!).

The walls were all bedecked with portraiture

Of Britain’s greatest names in literature:

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Donne,

Austen, Dickens, Scott, and Tennyson,

Doyle, Orwell, Lawrence, Woolf, and Shaw,

Wilde, Wells, Hardy, Greene and Waugh.

Surrounded by this legendary crew,

We’d eat and talk and read a poem or two.

Our speech we filled with dated terms like: fain,

Anon, alas, alack, amort, amain,

Athrob, athirst, and many other gray

And wrinkled words folks used back in the day.

Mickle, espy, yclept, naught, and thither

Victual, descry, mayhap, aught and hither --

A secret language rarely spoken since

The days when George IV was just a prince.

Sometimes upon a napkin we’d compose

Some sonnets, ballad stanzas, French rondeaus,

Sestinas or canzones, some silly ode:

On Nipple Rings, On Snot, On A Commode,

On Oral Sex, On Byron’s Foot, On Farts.

We’d giggle like two drunken British tarts.

Luckily the manager was cool.

An ex-pat Brit who’d studied Lit in school,

He liked us both and also shared our passion

For verse in the Romantic English fashion.

He kept us plied with napkins and he said,

‘Someday when you are famous and I’m dead,

My shade, in Hell, some solace will derive

From knowing that, when I was still alive,

I helped to nurture in my eatery

The two best poets of the century.’

We laughed and said, ‘We love the way you flatter,

But surely you exaggerate the matter.’

Soon-Li and I collected in our purses

All those scraps of silly nonsense verses,

And dreamed someday of filling several tomes

Collectively yclept The Napkin Poems:

A.M. Everheart’s and Soon-Li Pai’s

Very First Collaborative Tries

Or, because we dreamt them up therein:

Poems Written At The Boar’s Head Inn.

Our breakfast done, the inn we left behind

To see what great adventures we could find.

In libraries and bookstores we would roam

Looking for some rare Romantic tome –

Reflections on the Death of Louis XVI

The Golden Violet or Ada Reis.

We found one day – imagine our great bliss! –

Leticia Landon’s Improvisatrice,

A perfect copy all in leather bound.

T’was in a tiny bookshop it was found

And purchased for a pittance, I recall.

We felt that we’d made off with quite a haul.

Sometimes off to the cinema we’d go

To take a look at some new picture show.

Then afterwards, at my house or at hers,

Soon-Li and I would novelize in verse

The story we so recently had seen

Projected there upon the movie screen.

We’d take a piece of mindless movie fluff

And transform it into the very stuff

(Metered lines, enjambed end rhymes, great passion)

That Byron, Keats, and Shelley used to fashion.

Surprisingly, Soon-Li’s most cherished turns

Of phrase came from the pen of Robert Burns,

The poorest of the true Romantic greats,

While she had never been in dire straits.

And I, a daughter of the lumpen masses

Preferred the verses of the upper classes.

The titled lord, and sometimes rich, George Gordon

Composed the poems I found most rewarding.

Soon-Li oft quoted Burns and found ironic

My tendency to quote from works Byronic.

She loved the raunchiness of Burns’ stuff.

His men were always diving in the muff

Of some loose lass who’s also feeling frisky,

Or else they’re in a bar abusing whiskey.

‘Miranda,’ Soon-Li one day said to me

(She used my middle name exclusively;

She didn’t wish to share an appellation

With any other friend or close relation)

‘I know you think that Burns is hard to scan,

But really you should get to know the man.

His Scottish argot’s utterly amazing.

His people don’t wear clothes, they put on claithing.

A skirt is a kirtle and trousers are trews,

And shoon is the word for a pair of shoes.

His skirtling billies are sniggering lads

While giggling lasses are tittlan jads.

Your mither’s your mother; many are mony,

The other’s the ither, and bainy means bony.

Good manners are havins, a curchie’s a bow,

A lav’rock’s a lark and a hawkie’s a cow,

His moles are called moudiewurks, chickens are chucks,

It’s houlet for owl and douks for ducks.

Your ass cheeks are hurdies, your face is a phizz,

Your belly’s your kyte and your wig is a gizz,

Your ears are your lugs, a noddle’s your brain,

And when people are gone, to Burns they are gane.

When Burns says they ane, it means that they own,

To drink is to bowse, to piss is to stroan,

And when, in Burns, two folks get randy

Instead of fucking they houghmagandie.

Soon-Li adored these oddball Scottish phrases,

And used them in the most unlikely places.

At times to some poor book clerk she’d intone:

‘Is there a restroom? I must take a stroan.’

Or, when a saleswoman had upset her:

‘How’d you like to moistify my leather!’

To rudeness she’d respond, “I’ll dress your droddum!”

(That’s Burns’ phrase for “I will kick your bottom!”)

Though others always found this stuff confusing,

Both she and I considered it amusing.

Our days were all a whirl of delight.

My favorite time, however, was the night.

Her parents, noted surgeons, often spent

Their weekends off at seminars, or went

To migrant camps or Indian reservations

And other not-for-profit operations

To volunteer their services for free

At hospitals maintained by charity.

On weekends, then, the Pai estate became

Soon-Li’s demesne until the kyne came hame,

And being mistress of the manor, she

Would ask me to come stay, and I’d agree.

We oft would skinny dip out in the pool,

Then lie together in the midnight cool

And hearken to the wind chimes’ flats and sharps

As if they rose from true Aeolian harps.

One night as she lay naked by my side,

Soon-Li reached out and, smiling, almond-eyed,

She stroked my skin as if it were a lyre,

Igniting in my loins a sudden fire.

Then I reached out and took her hand in mine.

I kissed her fingertips, I traced a line

Upon her palm and tongued her slender wrist.

She rolled up close to me and gently kissed

My chin, my cheek, my eyelids, and my brow.

My heart grows weak just thinking on it now.

Thereafter she French kissed me, which no one

Before that blessed night had ever done.

I licked her tongue with mine and then I felt

As if my inner core would surely melt.

Quite soon our actions much more daring grew,

As we explored each other through and through

With tongue and lip and thumb and fingertip.

We’d lick, we’d graze, we’d probe, sometimes we’d sip

Upon each other’s secret private places.

Between each other’s legs we pressed our faces.

Like sisters at a goblin market stall

We peeled the fruits and sampled one and all,

We sucked and sucked and sucked and sucked some more

Until our lips (all eight of them) were sore.

Before we knew it, it was Sunday morn.

A fresh new day – and love – had just been born.

We went inside and fell into the bed.

We cuddled up, my face pressed to her head.

We drifted off and didn’t wake till ten,

And then we started fucking once again.

We dampened all the bedclothes with our sweat,

Exploring places soft and pink and wet

With conduct that was anything but chaste.

I memorized her secret scent and taste,

Her ticklish spots, the places she liked stroked,

Or licked or rubbed or sucked or gently poked.

Afterwards we climbed into the shower

And played at water sports for half an hour.

Later, when her folks at last got home,

We were in the family room where some

Half a dozen books of poetry

Were spread out on the floor ‘tween her and me.

Her mother clucked her tongue and smiled wryly.

‘Poetry?’ she said. We nodded shyly.

‘A weekend to yourselves and all you do

Is poke into a dusty tome or two,

Probing, like a surgeon, every phrase,

Teasing out the many different ways

The author might have meant it to be read?

Perhaps you should go exercise instead

Of lying with your faces pressed between

The covers of some book or magazine.’

Soon-Li at me glanced slyly, then she said,

With a wearied shaking of her head,

‘Oh, mom, we both find poking, probing, teasing

Between two covers really rather pleasing.

Perhaps there are more forms of exercise

Than doctors like you choose to recognize.

Yesterday, our legs and arms and chests

We worked in ways no fitness pro suggests.’

I looked at her as if she must be mad,

To tell her mom about the sex we’d had.

He mother’s eyebrows rose suspiciously.

‘Oh, yes?’ she said. ‘And what might those ways be?’

‘Perusing each and every used-book stall

Set up on the grassy downtown mall

Where every weekend vendors come to hawk

Old books and clothes, a couch, an antique clock.

We poked and probed and lost all track of time

Among old books of classic English rhyme,

Looking for a Hemans or some Shelleys,

Tautening our calves and thighs and bellies,

Stretching to the highest shelf and then

Squatting down close to the floor again

To see if some rare Yearsley might be found

Among the boxes scattered on the ground.

Afterwards for several hours more

We rambled through a giant used-book store,

Seeking on its shelves some rarities

Like Thomas Moore’s great Irish Melodies,

Rejected Addresses, say, by the brothers

Smith, Mary Tighe’s Psyche, lots of others.

In short, we spent the best part of the day

And even of the night, I have to say,

Poking, prodding, burying our faces

Into quite a few dark narrow places,

Looking for the things that bring us pleasure --

Beauty most sublime, poetic measure.’

Her mom, exasperated, shook her head.

‘I’ll leave you two pretentious snobs,’ she said,

‘To read your highfalutin literature.

It’s way above my head – of that I’m sure.

But maybe later on you’ll humor me

And put aside your precious poetry

Long enough to go out and inhale

Some fresh fall air. Good lord, you both look pale.

You need to get some color in your features.

You look just like two pasty woodland creatures,

Who shun the sunlight just like little moles

And never leave your dark and clammy holes.’

‘We like those holes,’ Soon-Li did then assert,

‘And hope to spend more time down in that dirt.’

After that, whenever we united,

Our longing for each other was requited

With hugs and body rubs and long wet kisses,

Lingering touches, lessons in what bliss is.

While pulling off her jeans or else her skirt

Sometimes I’d wink at her, and like a flirt,

I’d whisper, ‘I’ve been dying for the thrill

Of diving down into your dark molehill.’

The word became a shibboleth for us.

Moles and molehills were ubiquitous

In the private language that we spoke,

A secret lover’s code, a private joke.

‘Is Mrs. Mole a little shy today?’

‘Can Molly Mole please come on out and play?’

‘I’ve got a fearsome appetite for mole.

Mind if I go diving in your hole?’

Sometimes she’d kneel down before my twat

And mimicking her hero, Burns the Scot,

Say, ‘Lassie, can I worship at the Kirk

Of your most delightful Moudiewurk?

Let’s put your snatch and my wet tongue together

Because I’d like to moistify your leather.’

Good sex for us meant lots of fun and laughing,

The kind of merriment that Burns called daffin.

We never dropped our trews or raised our kirtles

Without a lot of tittlan and skirtles.

Her goofiness she mostly saved for me.

With others there were times when she could be

Aloof or reticent, a little stiff.

And seeing her this way I felt as if

T’was I alone knew each one of her moods,

Her funny and her sober attitudes,

Her ups and downs, her playfulness, her spite.

And only I knew how she looked at night

Enveloped, naked, in the moon’s soft shine

Her limbs and tongue and hair entwined with mine.

Others might believe they knew her essence

But only I had tasted her pubescence,

And she had done the same thing to my own

Though slightly less abundant and full-grown.

Because I was the younger of the pair,

Less worldly and not as self-aware,

Soon-Li towards me was always quite protective

And quick to rain down anger and invective

If she so much as mildly suspected

That by another I’d been disrespected.

God help the man or woman who invited

Her wrath if she imagined I’d been slighted.

Her parents threw a dinner party once

Where some professor labeled me a dunce

Because when I was asked to state the name

Of an all-time favorite poem, to my shame

I said, ‘John Keats’ great St. Agnes’ Eve,’

To which this smarmy prof said, ‘I believe,

That The Eve of St. Agnes is the true

Title of the piece – c’est entendu?’

My face began to turn a fiery red

Whereupon Soon-Li stood up and said,

‘In every letter, manuscript, and note

Referring to the poem John Keats wrote,

He titled it exactly as my friend did.

The other title likely was appended

Against John Keats’ wishes by some sloppy

Publisher who misread Keats’ copy.

It’s been in use two hundred years or so

By boobs like you who love the status quo,

But those of us who truly know the poet

Disdain that title, and we don’t bestow it

Upon the poem. We much prefer to say

St. Agnes’ Eve, for that was Keats’ way.

No – please don’t offer up some dumb bon mot.

Comprend bien, tu parles à un con.

With that, Soon-Li departed, and then I

Followed after her, my head held high.

The fall gave way to winter’s blustery cold.

Our love for one another grew tenfold.

For months and months now I got in the habit

Of every weekend fucking like a rabbit.

I lived in exile five long days each week

And rarely deigned to smile or to speak.

I dreaded any day that kept from me

The pleasure of my lover’s company.

I lived for days that started with an S

And for the others couldn’t care a less.

On weekends we spent hours at her mansion

Reading poems, analyzing scansion,

Studying the lives and loves and feats

Of all our heroes: Shelley, Byron, Keats –

Especially their amatory lives,

Their lovers, mistresses, and sometimes wives,

Abandoned children, bastards and legit,

Relationships suspiciously close-knit

With sisters, in-laws, half-sisters, and cousins

Chambermaids and nannies by the dozens.

Reading of these endless amorous frolics

Rendered us both giddy as alcoholics,

Aroused in us a need to shed our clothes

And lick each other’s skin from head to toes.

We’d throw aside our books and join our lips

(Just thinking on it now my heartbeat skips),

Then she’d remove my panties, I her bra,

And we’d make love until our flesh was raw.

Her skin was like a custard when you scorch

The surface briefly with a pastry torch:

A tawny-gold and much-more-smooth-than-silk

Concoction made of sugar, eggs, and milk,

Ambrosial to lick, a thrill to touch

Just made for petting, tongue-lapping and such.

She always wore a key around her neck.

She’d visit second-hand stores and she’d check

To see if they had any antique keys.

I’m still not sure just why she cared for these.

She liked the small ones best, the ones made for

A diary or tiny bureau drawer.

And often when her talk became excited,

She’d reach up to the key and hold it tight. It

Wasn’t something she did consciously,

But just a quirk of personality.

I asked her once about this oddball trait.

‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘Perhaps someday my fate

Will lead to circumstances that explain

The symbolism of my key and chain.’

When school stopped for Christmas holidays

We were together nearly all the days.

Each M and F and W and T

Was now just like a Saturday to me.

We roamed the malls and eyed the decoration,

Despising all the crass commercialization.

And when we’d had our fill of grinning elves

We hied ourselves off to the library’s shelves

To lose ourselves in books of poetry

Mostly from the 19^th century.

One day, while there, we had an inspiration:

Why not compose an epic verse narration

Immortalizing how we came to meet

And fall in love – all in metered feet

And rhyming couplets just like The Corsair

But rather than a pirate’s lady fair

And harem girl in captivity,

The leading ladies in our poem would be

A pretty Asian scholar, seventeen,

Possessed of an aristocratic mien,

And her lover -- younger, less refined,

Spunky, cute, artistically inclined.

The outline took us hours to complete.

We thought the poem should start before we meet.

In alternating cantos we’d portray

Our personal back-stories and the way

Each girl was raised, her birth, her early years,

Her life, her times, her joys, her secret fears,

Her schooling, her mother and her dad,

And all the ups and downs she might have had.

We’d build our stories separately and then,

Perhaps somewhere in Canto Nine or Ten,

Our histories would suddenly converge

And then a single tale would emerge,

A tale of two highly oversexed

Teenaged girls, in which each page of text

Is filled with heavy petting, cunnilingus,

The joy that Romance poetry would bring us

When we lay side by side in bed and read

The Wife of Crowle, My Arab Steed, or Beachy Head.

‘Tonight,’ Soon-Li said, ‘When we are apart,

Jot down some lines – dig deep within your heart

For memories about your childhood.

Insert all that you can, both bad and good:

Vacations with your parents, school crushes,

Classroom goofs that raised embarrassed blushes,

Your memories of learning how to swim,

Or falling from a playground jungle gym,

The first time that you rode upon a bike --

Describe what these experiences were like.

Tomorrow we’ll begin the transformation

Of these notes about your maturation

From random bits of raw, unpolished prose

Into the stuff Lord Byron might compose

Were he alive and writing very graphic

Poems about lovers young and Sapphic,

Which, knowing Byron, he would love to do

Although he’d probably make them sisters too.

We’ll call upon the great Calliope,

The ancient muse of epic Poetry,

To bless this daring enterprise of ours

To versify our mutual memoirs,

And elevate them to the status of

A great Romantic epic poem of love,

A work that demonstrates that Poetry

Is more than just a tale in melody;

It holds a mirror to our troubled souls.

It shines a light into our darkest holes.

We’ll try our best to put in every line

Some word or phrase for tingling the spine.

The only reason one should exercise

One’s writing gift is to make neck hairs rise.

If we keep that in mind while we are writing,

Our poetry can’t help but be exciting.

So scribble down some notes tonight and then

Tomorrow morning at the stroke of ten

We’ll take our memories of days of old

And try to spin them into lines of gold.’

Soon-Li, alas, could not begin that night

To put her story down in black and white.

‘Our football team has reached the final round

Of the district playoffs, so I am bound

For Metro Stadium to cheer them on.

And if they win we’ll celebrate till dawn

Or thereabouts,’ she said. ‘But lose or win

We’ll meet at ten tomorrow and begin

Commemorating our undying passion

In the grand Romantic-era fashion.’

I’d been to see these football games before

But didn’t plan to go to any more.

It pained me to sit passively and watch

While all those men were staring at her crotch

Whenever Soon-Li kicked a leg up high.

It made me wish to see the bastards die

When, with blatant longing, they would glance

Lustfully at Soon-Li’s underpants.

When watching all these paunchy, balding guys

Undress my one true love with leering eyes,

I wanted to scream out: ‘Go get a life!

Don’t you get enough from your own wife?

Must you sit and endlessly appraise

As if through glasses fitted with X-rays

My girlfriend’s vagina through her clothes?

Good lord, I’d love to slug you in the nose!’

I feared Soon-Li would find this attitude

Quite juvenile, the musings of a prude.

And so I kept my feelings locked inside

And told her that I just could not abide

Football’s warlike posturing and violence.

I stayed at home, suffering in silence.

And that is why, to my undying shame,

I wasn’t there at Soon-Li’s final game.

For if I’d been, she’d be alive today

Instead of lying cold beneath the clay.

She would have picked me up at three p.m.

Then whisked us over to the stadium.

And when the game at last was over she’d

Have not meandered unaccompanied

Into the darkened corner of the lot

That she’d selected for her parking spot.

For I’d have been there too, and it’s well known

That only when he saw a girl alone

Would Harvey Prine proceed with his assault,

Otherwise he’d bring it to a halt

And wait until a more auspicious time

To perpetrate his sick and twisted crime.

Had I been with her on that fateful night

Her killer would have turned and taken flight,

And since it was the last game of the season

It’s absolutely logical to reason

That he’d have given up and gone away

And she and I’d be lovers still today.”

She looked up then and stared Tom in the face.

“Unfortunately, such is not the case.

Soon-Li is dead and I am all alone.

And through the intervening years I’ve grown

Increasingly less sure exactly who

That fucker Prine did greater damage to:

Soon-Li, who’s dead and knows no earthly care,

Or I, who linger on in black despair?

Eight years have passed, eight summers with the length

Of eight long centuries, and yet the strength

Of my bereavement has not waned a bit.

My life remains a dark and chilly pit.

When Harvey Prine stabbed Soon-Li in the heart

He stabbed me too, and in the selfsame part.

From her he right away removed the blade,

In me, alas, the knife has always stayed.

She sleeps inside the earth, and peace is there.

But I have never found it anywhere.

I can’t feel love or happiness again.

In truth I cannot even feel much pain.

I tried for years escaping from this numbness

By writing poems, but a form of dumbness

Had claimed my writing voice, preventing me

From saying what I wished poetically.

And so I thought instead I might compose

A book in plain and ordinary prose

About the only thing that interests me

The love that I once shared with dear Soon-Li.

I wanted rather desperately to tell

The whole wide world of my Asian belle,

The way she kissed, the way she laughed and talked,

Her smell, her taste, and how she sometimes locked

Her lips upon my breast as if to suck

The heart out of my chest. How we would fuck

Until the bed was like a giant sponge

All wet with sweat, and then we’d take a plunge

Bare naked after midnight in her pool,

The way the moonlight later would bejewel

The many drops of water on her skin,

And how I’d lay her down and then begin

To lap up all those jewels with my tongue

From each protuberance to which they clung –

Her two pink nipples and her graceful nose,

Her eyelashes and all ten of her toes,

I drank her up just as a sponge drinks water,

This love of mine, this perfect Albion’s daughter,

I’d spread her legs and press my face down there

To suck the droplets from her pubic hair,

And while I had her with her legs aspar

(That’s Burns, it means: to spread out very far)

I’d slowly work my way down farther south

Until her cunt was pressed against my mouth

Whereupon I dove for other pearls,

The pink and shiny ones that many girls

Prefer to gold and silver and such treasure

Because they bring the greatest part of pleasure.

At times we’d stand together and we’d hug

And then we’d drop our skirts down to the rug

Where they would fall like rings around our feet,

The denim overlapping where they’d meet.

Then off we’d go to fuck upon the bed.

Afterwards I’d rise and turn my head

And see our two jean skirts upon the floor

Side-by-side just like the symbol for

Infinity, a sideways figure eight,

Which I hoped might symbolize our fate.

Alas, although our love goes on and on,

Its physical dimension now is gone.

And so at night, when stepping from my clothes

I put away my blouse and bra and hose

But always I leave lying on the ground

My skirt, and hope come morning I’ll look down

And see two slightly overlapping skirts.

And every morning when I wake it hurts

To find my life, my future, and my fate

Not symbolized there by a sideways eight

But rather by an empty fabric ring.

Infinity for one’s a wretched thing.

Sometimes instead of waking to that sight

I wish that I could perish in the night.

The book I hoped might literarily

Preserve our story for posterity

Would never come together on the page.

My hatred, anger, sorrow, and my rage –

All these feelings constantly deterred

The writing of a single worthwhile word.

I longed, in prose, to build a pyramid

Commemorating everything we did

During those six wondrous months we spent

Together, but my hoped-for monument

Remained a mere idea and unbuilt

Primarily because of all my guilt.

Constantly I heard inside my head

A tiny but persistent voice that said,

‘You should have gone. You should have been with her.

Your very presence would have helped deter

Her murder, and she’d be alive today.

But, nooo, you didn’t like her to display

Her sexiness for anyone but you,

And so, a spoiled child, you opted to

Remain at home and pout inside your room

While she went off alone to face her doom.’

I knew the things this voice said were unfair.

I knew that I did not deserve a share

Of the blame for what that asshole Prine

Had done that night, but still this guilt of mine

Would not abate, would not leave me alone

Unless I made some effort to atone

For all I did (or all I didn’t do)

The day Soon-Li was killed by you-know-who.

For years I tried to come up with some plan

For killing that abhorrent little man.

I saved my money, hoping I could pay

Another inmate at the jail to slay

The bastard for me, but it didn’t work.

I contacted the wife of some dumb jerk

Who’d shot six people in a liquor store

(He wounded two and killed the other four).

I offered her ten thousand dollars cash

(A fortune in the land of trailer trash)

If she’d convince her husband to assail

With lethal force a man inside the jail

Against whom I was nursing quite a grudge.

She shook her head and said, ‘What if a judge

Someday decides my husband has repaid

Society for having one time sprayed

A liquor store with bullets and it’s time

That he should be forgiven for his crime?

The killing of this Harvey Prine asshole

Might cost my man his chance for a parole.’

‘He’s serving four life sentences,’ I said

‘The only way he’s leaving jail is dead.

Why shouldn’t he do something to atone

For leaving you and your three kids alone?

He once shot four men dead and hurt two more

While stealing eighty dollars from a store --

That’s twenty bucks for everyone he killed.

I’m offering him a raise – he should be thrilled.

Ten thousand dollars for a single murder,

To turn that down just couldn’t be absurder.’

But she could simply not be thus enticed.

‘My husband’s different now. He worships Christ.

He reads the bible. He’s been born again.

And he regrets the killing of those men.

His soul has been washed clean by Jesus’ blood.

By killing Harvey Prine he’d splatter mud

Upon a soul that’s pure as driven snow.

Keep your cash. It’s time for you to go.’

And with those words she ushered me outside

The doorway of her beat-up double-wide.

As much as I desired to see Prine die,

All my plans to kill him went awry.

I offered cash to one more inmate’s wife

If she’d convince her man to take Prine’s life.

She swore he was the right man for the job.

‘He used to be a hit man for the mob.

He’ll kill this guy just like a seasoned pro,

And why or how, the cops will never know.

Search from New York City to Toledo,

You’ll find no better killer than my Guido.’

She wanted payment in advance, but I

Suspected she was telling me a lie.

‘My research says your husband’s behind bars

Because he lured young girls into cars

And made them put their mouths upon his dick

And suck it like a gumdrop on a stick.’

‘Oh, that was just a hobby,’ she protested.

‘Guido’s far too sharp to be arrested

For any of the killing’s that he’s done.

He wipes the prints and throws away the gun.

But when it came to practicing his hobby

He was such a dumb and careless slob he

Never gave a thought about the traces

Of DNA left smeared upon the faces

Of all those little schoolgirls of his.

His downfall was imprinted in his jizz.

But there’ll be not a single drop of sperm

To tie him to the killing of this worm

That you are so determined to destroy,

And that’s exactly why he is the boy

To carry out this contract hit of yours,

Provided I get paid up front, of course.’

I told her I worked strictly C.O.D.

‘You’ll get the cash when Harvey’s ceased to be.’

She shrugged and said, ‘I’ll do my best,’ and then

We parted and we never met again.

The years went by and not one scheme of mine

Resulted in the death of Harvey Prine.

I feared that I might never shed the curse

That kept me from composing prose or verse

But then a sudden insight came to me:

Perhaps if I performed symbolically

The killing of that wretched little fuck

My creativity might come unstuck

And I could then go forward with my goal

Of writing up in words poetical

An epic romance, thrilling and sublime,

About that tiny increment of time

When all the world seemed bright and new to me

Because I was the lover of Soon-Li.

I knew that it would never work at all

To just push pins into a voodoo doll.

To absolutely exorcise that demon

Who’d hardened on my soul just like the semen

That Guido on his victims had besplattered

I needed to perform some act that mattered,

That carried with it real-life consequences,

The kind of act whose utter virulence is

So bold that it transcends mere symbolism

And changes us, like light waves through a prism.

At first I thought I might perhaps waylay

Harvey’s father as he made his way

Back home one night from working at his shop.

I’d take a razor with me and I’d chop

An ear off of his head, perhaps his nose,

His pinky finger, several of his toes,

Or reach into his pants and from between his

Legs remove his scrotum and his penis.

By some such act as this I hoped to banish

The guilt I felt, and also to make vanish,

As if by magic, Harvey’s strange control

Upon both my emotions and my soul,

Ending finally the great stagnation

That long had fallowed my imagination.

But old man Prine was really not so bad.

It wasn’t his fault that he was the dad

Of a truly monstrous psychopath,

A fount of hatred, evil, and of wrath.

And so I chose to let the old man be

And looked around in hope that I might see

A better target for my plan of attack

To pay Harvey Prine, symbolically, back.

By chance I discovered an Internet site

Where women discussed with each other the plight

Of loving and caring for only those men

Wasting away in a government pen.

Among these ladies was one who mentioned

An actor she knew who had a penchant

For aping the look, the manner, and mien

(His vocal effects were especially keen)

Of some our nation’s most infamous

Engagers in evil and sinfulness:

Like Louis L. Pressman who raped and slew

Eleven young hitchers on Route 102,

And Percy Dupree, a Baptist minister

A man so vile, demented and sinister,

He coaxed the aged to make him sole heir

Of estates that made him a millionaire

When later he killed them in some secret way

The details of which are too grisly to say.

And yet the performance in greatest demand

The one for which women would eagerly hand

Him hundreds of dollars for each private show

In condo, apartment, or small bungalow,

Was the performance he gave in the guise

Of that horrible cretin – goddamn his eyes! –

Who brutally murdered and afterwards raped

My lover Soon-Li, whose body he draped,

Naked and blood-drained, as white as a ghost

Up high on the stadium’s southern goal post,

As if she were merely some poster or banner

Affixed to the wall in a negligent manner

And blown by the wind overnight from its spot

Until like a kite in a tree it was caught

Dangling lifeless, and destined to fly

Never again like a bird through the sky.

A terrible crime, and yet, from off it,

You were receiving a generous profit –

One hundred dollars an hour, they said.

That’s roughly seventeen dollars per head

For each of the victims of Harvey Prine’s knife,

A pitiful price to pay for a life.

But when, over time, you started to add

Up all your hours, the earnings weren’t bad:

Four hundred a night, two thousand a week,

Perhaps not enough to live like a sheik

But certainly more than a loser like you

Had ever before been accustomed to.

And when I read about your sordid work

A light bulb o’er my head dispelled the murk

In which I had been stumbling lost and blind

And blazing clarity illumed my mind.

I knew at last that what I had to do

To ease my heart was find and murder you,

A lowly parasite who had for years

Been getting fat on other people’s tears,

A shameless and disgusting little creep

Who’d sold his soul to Satan on the cheap

And now was earning quite a handsome fee

By cashing in on Harvey’s killing spree,

The kind of cur who’d never wield the dagger

But eagerly becomes a carpetbagger

And rides to town upon death’s awful wake

To see what kind of money he can make.

And any man who’d profit from the slaughter

Of my love and fellow Albion’s daughter,

A girl so lovely, brilliant and fine,

Whose spirit, like an angel’s, was divine –

Yes, any man who’d take a single dime

Connected in some way with such a crime

As Soon-Li’s murder is no man at all,

He lacks a soul, he’s like the worms that crawl

Into the freshly dead and make a feast

Upon the putrid guts of the deceased.

The killing of a man who lacks a soul

Is not a crime but merely pest control.

And so I schemed to bring you to my lair

And get you to sit down upon that chair

And tell you this long story, so that later

As I prepared to play exterminator

And you the role of black and loathsome roach

Whose death by fumes does rapidly approach

You’d know for sure why all this came to pass.

And then I’d aim my wand and spray the gas.

I speak, as you can see, in metaphors.

It isn’t gas I’ll spray you with, of course,

But bullets, after which I’ll grab the phone

And in a weak and frightened voice I’ll moan

That I have been the victim of a rape

Attempt but somehow managed to escape

Just long enough to reach for my nightstand

And, taking up a pistol in my hand,

Did fire off some bullets at the head

Of my assailant, killing him stone dead.

And now I need the cops because I’m tied

To a bedpost and I can’t abide

The thought of spending just one minute more

Trapped here with a dead man on the floor.

So now I’ve brought you fully up to speed.

There’s no more information that you need

To understand just why I lured you here.

I hope my purpose now is plain and clear.

In my opinion you’re, after the fact,

A co-conspirator in Harvey’s act

Of murdering my best and only friend

And bringing my life also to an end.

I cannot say that you were there assisting

When Harvey stabbed Soon-Li, but you’re still twisting

The blade so that my pain can not subside

Until, via an act of homicide,

I send you to a cold and cheerless grave,

Which act must sate my bloodlust until they’ve

Denied the last of Harvey Prine’s appeals

And, strapped into an armchair, Harvey feels

The first electric volts begin to sear

The flesh of every finger, toe, and ear,

A flow that just gets stronger till at last

His eyes melt in their sockets and a blast

Of smoke that smells like burning meat and wool

Starts rising from the skin upon his skull.”

With that she smiled at Tom and raised a ‘brow.

“Have you some final words to utter now?”

Tom looked into her eyes and what he saw

Inspired in him fear and dread and awe,

For clearly she was utterly insane,

And driven that way by the loss and pain

Inflicted on her by the son of Satan

That Tom now specialized in imitating.

He knew that he was in an awful jam.

She’s unaware of who and what I am,

He thought as he continued just to stare

Into the hateful unremitting glare

Projecting like a laser from her eyes.

She thinks because I came here in the guise

Of Harvey Prine that somehow he and I

Are linked in some dark way, and that is why

She feels that she symbolically can end

The life of he who murdered her best friend

By blowing me away in Harvey’s stead.

She’s got this weird idea in her head

That shooting me, who never did her harm,

Will cause her stone-cold heart to start to warm

Until the ice upon it melts away

And she is free to love again someday,

To live a life unfettered by the hate

That everyday chokes off her own innate

Desire to be happy once again,

To take up with great confidence her pen

And, freed from writers’ block and crippling rage,

At last begin to set down on the page

In rhymed and metered lines the untold story

About the love that filled her youth with glory.

Of course, thought Tom, she’s really full of shit.

She doesn’t have the talent or the wit

To write a worthy line of prose or verse,

But she’s suppressed this knowledge and, what’s worse,

Convinced herself the one and only key

To setting her imagination free

Is making me the scapegoat for the guy

Who murdered her beloved Soon-Li Pai.

She’s nuts, of course, but I can’t tell her so,

For crazy people only seem to grow

Less stable when confronted with the news

Their trolley’s jumped the track and running loose.

It’s best when you’re confronting the insane

To try your very hardest to maintain

The illusion that you find all that they say –

No matter how they froth and spit and spray –

As sensible as “two plus two is four”

While subtly you sidle towards the door

And soon as you are able start to beat

A hasty and untraceable retreat.

But that, right now, cannot be easily done.

The door is locked and this nut holds a gun

Which currently is pointed at my heart.

She’d shoot me dead if I should even start

To leave this chair and make a sudden dash

For freedom. No, I must do nothing rash.

I first must calm her down a bit, and since her

Mind’s obsessed with Prine, I must convince her

That he and I have no symbolic link.

I’m just an actor, and she mustn’t think

That I took up this role because I thought

He’d gotten a bum rap and that I ought

To try to rehabilitate his name

Or mitigate his many acts of shame.

Somehow I have to prove to her that I

Believe, like her, that Harvey ought to die.

And so he settled back into his seat,

Relaxed a bit, stretched out, and crossed his feet.

He looked his interviewer in the eyes

And said, “Like you I utterly despise

That vicious little cretin Harvey Prine

As well as this queer specialty of mine.

In truth, I only play his part because

My every try for honest stage work was –

Just like my stabs at filmdom and TV –

Foredoomed because the whole damn industry

Is rife with favoritism, which helps out

Those actors who possess a bit of clout

Because their stepdad or their Uncle Joe

Runs a theater chain or studio,

Fox Television, Disney, ABC,

Perhaps a major casting company.

Sean Penn might be a lowly bill collector

If daddy hadn’t worked as a director.

It’s certain Michael Douglas got much work

Because he was the oldest son of Kirk.

And Angelina Jolie could exploit

The fact that she’s a child of John Voight.

On stage and screen and even radio

It’s not how well you act but who you know

That dictates if your star will rise or fall

Or even get a chance to shine at all.

My father was no media exec,

He didn’t draw a hefty weekly check

From Rupert Murdoch or from Viacom.

He taught high-school civics, and my mom

Sold trinkets in a little airport shop

To supplement the earnings of my pop.

They didn’t have much money but they’d strive

To keep my show-biz fantasies alive.

They’d scrimp and save and stifle their own needs,

They’d drive old cars and dress in faded tweeds,

So I could take tap dance and singing lessons

With other show-biz-minded adolescents.

When young, I had a speech impediment

That marred the way I talked, but always went

Away when I recited from a page

Or stood and quoted Shakespeare from the stage.

My parents hoped through acting I’d obtain

A skill with words that might help me to gain

Control over the mortifying stutter

That blighted each unscripted word I’d utter.

It worked but it took years of sacrifice

By mom and dad to pay the heavy price

Of all the acting classes I attended.

God only knows how much those two expended

On summer camps for show-biz wannabes,

On costumes, private tutors, admission fees.

They paid my way through university,

Where I received a theater-arts degree.

And after all that very costly training

For ten long years I sought without attaining

An acting job upon the screen or stage,

Or anything where I might earn a wage

While doing what I’d trained for years to do.

Most times the part I coveted went to

The nephew or the brother or the son

Of some director or great thespian.

No matter how untalented these slobs,

They had no trouble getting acting jobs

Because their Aunt Marie or Uncle Stu

Was in the biz and personally knew

A Broadway casting agent, Meryl Streep’s

Private secretary, several veeps

At MGM in charge of film production,

The doc who handled J-Lo’s liposuction

And also pumped the silicone into

The tits of Demi Moore and Lucy Liu,

Bruce Willis’ wigmaker and Nick Cage’s,

A guy who sweeps up Paramount’s soundstages.

The list goes on and on but it’s a fact:

It’s who you know and not how well you act

In screen tests and auditions for a part

(Nor all your years of suffering for art)

That finally is going to decide

Whether you get picked or shoved aside,

Whether you become the next Tom Cruise

Or end up in Sandusky selling shoes.

Forget about the many other factors

That bear upon the lives of struggling actors,

The thing that most influences your fate

Is whether there’s a show-biz potentate

Amid the branches of your family tree.

Your skill means nothing. Genealogy

Will trump all of your study and your strife

And ultimately dominate your life.

It wasn’t greed but merely desperation

That drove me to my current situation

In which the only parts that I can play

And actually receive some decent pay

Are murders and rapists and mad bombers

Whose crimes, like Tim McVeigh’s and Jeffrey Dahmer’s,

Appall the minds of ordinary folk

But somehow manage only to evoke

Compassion and desire in those gals,

Who tend to look for husbands or pen pals

Among the many tiny little cells

Of prisons where no decent human dwells.

And if these women feel some odd desire

To spend time with a killer, and they hire

Me to play the role and pay me well,

Then who am I to tell them, ‘Go to hell.

Your need is sick and, candidly, I think

Instead of me you ought to hire a shrink.’?

We do no harm. We play our small charade

In private homes. The killers I’ve portrayed

Receive no royalties or benefits

From my performances. Nobody gets

Made wretched by this silly little game.

So why should I feel any kind of shame?”

For several minutes longer in this vein

Tom went on attempting to explain

To Annabelle about the things he’d done –

The battles that he fought but never won,

The many years of hardship and travail,

And how it galls a man to always fail

When seeking work within the field he’s chosen,

And how, approaching thirty, he’d felt frozen

In a pond of failure, like a duck

Who wakes one winter morn to find he’s stuck

In solid ice while way up in the sky

All his flock-mates, flying south, go by.

“That’s how I felt when I awoke each day –

As if my dream were flying fast away,

And like that duck I’d paddle and I’d scream

But never gain an inch upon my dream.

In every show-biz newspaper I’d read

About some college pal who got the lead

In some new play by Shepard or by Mamet.

I’d tear my hair and then I’d scream, ‘Goddammit!’

Oh, sure I’ve landed roles, I’ve played some parts

At small town venues for dramatic arts,

Some dinner shows where diners chewed and sipped

And drowned out all the best parts of the script,

I’ve done a show or two in summer stock

At Bakersfield, Visalia, Antioch,

But never have I earned a living wage

For anything I’ve done upon the stage.

And if you cannot make a nickel from

Your art you’re made to feel just like a bum,

For in this land where money is our God

The starving artist’s deemed a lousy fraud

And even if he’s talented feels worthless,

Adrift alone in space, marooned and earthless.

And thus it was a soul-deep desperation

Mingled with a truckload of frustration

That led me to this current state of mine,

Portraying animals like Harvey Prine.

Since you yourself aspire to write grand

Poetic epics, you must understand

Just what it means to nurture in your heart

An overwhelming passion for your art

And never manage to contrive a way

To let your talent see the light of day.

In fact, I think that you and I are quite

Alike in many ways. You want to write

Great verse and prose but, plagued by writers’ block,

You’re stuck between a hard place and a rock.

You can’t give up your dream – it is innate

To who you are inside, and yet your hate

For Harvey Prine has stoppered up the well

Of words inside you that you need to tell

The story of your love for Soon-Li Pai.

Artistically you’re stifled. So am I.

When young I dreamt that I’d be no less than

My generation’s leading leading man,

Like Brando or Pacino or James Dean,

I’d be a legend of the silver screen.

But look at me and see what I’ve become.

I’m certainly no king of moviedom.

This Harvey Prine disguise you see me wear

Was forced on me by failure and despair.

You needn’t punish me for all the stuff

I’ve done, because it’s punishment enough

To have to wear this horrible disguise

And make my living batting wounded eyes

At heavyset and unattractive broads

With all the sex appeal of octopods.

By killing me you’d just be cutting short

The misery that every day I court

When I go out in Harvey’s wretched form

And do the very best I can to warm

The hearts and lives of women I abhor.

So why you feel the need to add one more

Nail to the coffin that contains

The earthly and most pitiful remains

Of all the dreams I harbored in my youth,

I cannot understand, to tell the truth.

Instead of squaring off like enemies

Let’s put aside these dumb hostilities

And unify our efforts to attain

Success as artists. Maybe we could gain

A leg up in our difficult vocations

By harnessing our two imaginations.

Why couldn’t we each play the other’s muse?
A partnership like that just might infuse

Our minds with cleverness and new ideas.

In tandem we might find a way to be as

Successful as we both have always wanted

And shed the failures by which we’re haunted.

Together we’ll board splendid trains of thought

Whose cargo holds are positively fraught

With fresh perspectives, boundless inspirations,

And ride them to their final destinations.

Because I am an actor I know much

About the words of Shakespeare, Shaw, and such,

And I could help you get your mojo back

And put your writing on a winning track

By reading through your work and telling you

Which lines trip off the tongue and boogaloo

With graceful steps from stage to balcony

And please the ear with artless euphony,

And which ones are impossible to say

In any kind of naturalistic way

Because they tend to clatter and to clunk

And come out sounding like a load of bunk.

And you because you are an autodidact

Might help me to improve the way that I act.

I’ve taken lessons from a tender age

In all the arts an actor needs onstage

But all those years of formal education

Have rendered my approach to my vocation

Perhaps a wee bit rote and artificial.

I think it might be truly beneficial

If I could spend some time with you and hear

Much more about those poets you revere –

Keats and Shelley, Byron, Blake, and Clare.

Your love for them and knowledge about their

Immortal works are clearly products of

A passion for them bordering on love,

Not a pedant’s mere fixation on the rules

Of all the things they teach in writing schools.

Your love for words is true, not – like a scholar’s –

Born of lust for tenure and research dollars.

You read the works that fill your heart with passion

And do not give a damn for current fashion,

Or else you’d put aside the Coleridge

And delve into post-modern verbiage.

I think if I could spend more time with you

Perhaps it just might help me to imbue

My own work with the kind of artless zeal

You bring to yours, and you in turn might feel

Inspired by the craft and discipline

I bring to every stage play that I’m in

Even though it’s just some harlequinade

Performed for kids in first and second grade.

What say we put aside our enmity?

Why not embrace artistic unity?

Together, we might both go very far.

You’ll sell a book and I’ll become a star.

Who knows, perhaps we’ll fail, but so what?

We’re both already mired in a rut.

As teammates we might make a succes fou.

I’m game to make a go of it – are you?”

Miss Everheart just smiled and shook her head.

“Nice try, but I still plan to shoot you dead.

I’d have to be a half- or lesser wit

To fall for such a stupid load of shit,

For you and I are not alike at all,

Our similarities are rather small;

Our differences, however, are immense.

The parallels you draw do not make sense.

I am no artless poetry savant

Or overly ambitious dilettante.

Although I never made it into college

I nonetheless have endless stores of knowledge

About Romantic writers and their work.

For years I was a bookstore salesclerk

At mine and Soon-Li’s favorite used-book shop,

A place where poets often came to swap

Old stories or old books, and often both,

A cavernous old barn that, on my oath,

Housed what was then the state’s largest selection

Of poetry. I oversaw the section,

And stocked it full of Shelley, Blake and Scott

And books from all that great Romantic lot.

The owner much admired dear Soon-Li,

And when she died he greatly pitied me.

He offered me employment in his store

And paid me twice as much or maybe more

Than any other bookshop clerk on earth,

Far more, at least, than I was surely worth.

He treated me as if I were his daughter.

He knew just what an awful shock the slaughter

By Harvey Prine of Soon-Li was to me

And did his best to help me wrestle free

From all the demons tormenting my soul.

He sought to help me fill the fist-sized hole

Within my chest where once there was a heart

By making me the mistress of that part

Of the store where Soon-Li used to wander

For hours on end in search of books to squander

Her week’s allowance on. ‘T’was years ago,

When Soon-Li was a child of – I dunno –

Ten, perhaps, she first came to my shop.

And even then she never deigned to stop

To see the children’s books but beelined for

The old Romantic poetry and lore,’

Said Mr. Gandt to me, ‘And that is why

I’ve dubbed this area “The Soon-Li Pai

Reading Room and Poetry Collection”

And want to make you mistress of the section.’

‘T’would be an honor,’ I said in reply.

I worked part-time until the end of my

Senior year, then after graduation

The job became my rock and my salvation.

I spent my days there organizing shelves

Where oft Soon-Li and I had hid ourselves

Away for hours poring over tomes

Of little-known Romantic-Era poems.

And when I was cocooned within that room

I found myself unburdened of the gloom

That elsewhere seemed to settle on my spirit

So heavily I’d sometimes start to fear it

Just might crush me underneath its awesome weight

Like the camel with his heavy load of freight

When he takes on that proverbial last straw.

And so for many hours I’d withdraw

Into that room where she I loved and I

Strange fits of passion felt when we would spy

Some odd Romantic poem heretofore

Unknown to us but lovely to the core.

Old Mr. Gandt, he always treated me

With patience and with endless sympathy.

He held the patent on some odd device

His father had invented, which was nice,

Because it made him independently

Wealthy, meaning that the shop which he

So loved and doted on could generate

No income or could even operate

In the red for weeks or months or years

Without provoking monetary fears.

And so I was left free most days to nurse

My jones for Romance literature in verse

And very seldom had to lift a finger

To aid a shopper. I was free to linger

Over many a quaint and curious

Volume of forgotten lore with serious

Scholarly attention to details.

I did the kind of work that oft entails

Long hours in research facilities

By scholars working towards their Ph.D.s

And one result was that I gained a great

Respect for those who choose to dedicate

Their lives to education and research

Who treat the university as a church

And worship at the altar of Apollo,

The god of learning, and who tend to hallow

The very act of increasing one’s knowledge.

So, no I never went away to college,

But though my background’s totally blue-collar

I don’t disdain, like you, the English scholar,

For that’s what my late lover longed to be:

The world’s most renowned authority

On Byron, Shelley, Southey, Keats and Scott.

And had she lived, no doubt she would have taught

At Oxford or at Harvard or at Yale

And written books the critics would all hail

As monuments of learning and research.

So, don’t think you can sit there and besmirch

Formal scholarship and win my favor.

A scholar’s notes have oft proved my lifesaver

When I’ve been baffled by some old archaic

Wording that I’ve found in lines stanzaic.

I don’t disdain the scholar. Save your breath.

You can’t escape your rendezvous with death

With cheap psychology and empty calls

For ‘peace between us artists.’ That shit falls

On deafened ears in my case, I’m afraid,

For snow will fall on Satan’s vast brigade

Before I change my mind and set you free.

You’ve made yourself the very effigy

Of Harvey Prine and so it’s right and just

That like an effigy you should combust.

And when I put my bullet in your heart

The flames you’ve long deserved will finally start

Devouring your soul, as you’re enrolled

In that brigade whose ranks are never cold.”

Poor Tom did not find comfort in these words.

His courage, like a flock of frightened birds,

Rose up on flapping wings and fast departed,

Leaving him despairing and downhearted.

“Miss Everheart,” he said without conviction,

“I think that your extremely harsh depiction

Of me and all my faults is not quite fair.

No doubt, like many men, I’ve done my share

Of things despicable and downright shoddy,

But never have I plunged into a body

A knife repeatedly, nor have I raped

A cheerleader’s cadaver and then draped

It on a post like laundry on a line.

In short, I’m not at all like Harvey Prine.

My trespasses, indeed, are rather slight.

I’ve lied, I’ve scammed, sometimes I’ve spent the night

With girls I knew I’d never call again,

I’ve cheated on my taxes now and then,

Sometimes, when I’ve been broke, I’ve bolted from

A restaurant before the bill could come,

I’ve borrowed from a friend and not repaid,

And once, at university, I laid

The wife of a professor I despised

And afterwards made sure he was apprised.

The outcome was a messy one, of course:

Teardrops, acrimony, a divorce.

But none of these admittedly atrocious

Acts of mine, as I see it, approaches

The level of a capital offense.

And certainly we minor miscreants

Should not be punished with the same degree

Of harshness as those men whose villainy

Includes such acts as murder or molesting

A child, rape, grand theft, perhaps requesting

Ransom for a kidnapped heir or heiress.

When punishing such misdeeds truly there is

No reason for displaying moderation.

Electrocution, cyanide, castration –

In my opinion all these things are fine

For punishing such men as Harvey Prine.

But when it comes to punishing a man

Like me, whose crimes are not much greater than

The kind that you would hear each day, in truth,

Were you to sit in a confession booth

Just like a Catholic priest, and a parade

Of faithful penitents unto you made

A full account of every small transgression

That they’d committed since their last confession –

The small white lies, the impure thoughts, the lust

They felt while staring at some woman’s bust,

The unkind words they spoke to dad or mom,

The girls they viewed on pussyshots.com,

The wallet that they found and drained of cash

Then tossed into a canister of trash,

The drunkenness, the gluttony, the sloth

And all the minor sins men of the cloth

Must listen to each day and then absolve,

Low crimes and misdemeanors that involve

Little malice or premeditation

But just a momentary deviation

From the straight and narrow way of life –

With sins like that my conscience may be rife

But can you honestly believe that I

For such pathetic sins deserve to die?

I never even met your friend Soon-Li;

Why should you pin her tragic death on me?”

“Shut up at once, you filthy little cur.

You don’t deserve to even mention her.

To hear her lovely name upon your tongue

Is like beholding in a pile of dung

An absolutely flawless hundred-carat

Diamond, and I simply cannot bear it.”

“I’m sorry for the sorrows that you’ve known.

I’ve had a few rough setbacks of my own.

My parents both were killed three years ago.

An accident. They skidded in the snow

While driving their dilapidated Dodge

En route to the same rustic mountain lodge

Where thirty years before as bride and groom

Inside the lodge’s Honeymooner’s Room

On the evening of the day that they were wed

They first lay down together in a bed.

And so their anniversary-day trek

Resulted in a fatal auto wreck.

A couple that no force on earth could part

Died side-by-side together in their Dart.

My brother was just thirteen years of age

When both our parents shuffled from the stage,

Thus I became his guardian and sole

Provider. I took on a parent’s role.

With money from the outfit that insured

The lives of both my parents, I procured

Enrollment for my brother in a good

Preparatory school – Collingswood.

He boards there now. But soon the modest sum

Paid out to us by New Millenium

Insurance will be gone and when it is

I’ll have to pay my brother’s school for his

Tuition and his room and board with my

Earnings as an actor, which is why

I play the awful part of Harvey Prine,

Because it is the only role of mine

That brings to me enough remuneration

To subsidize my brother’s education.”

“Nice try but you’re completely full of shit.

I don’t believe a single word of it.”

“It’s true, I tell you, every word I said:

My brother is my ward. My folks are dead.”

“Then, quickly, what’s your brother’s name?”

“It’s…Tim.”

“I’m sorry but I don’t believe in him.

And even if I did believe such twaddle,

Because you are a negative role model –

You prey on lonely women and you profit

From other people’s crimes and then you scoff at

The very ‘gals’ and ‘broads’ who pay your bills –

I’m certain that the pistol shot that stills

Your heart and brain activity will be

Performing a good deed for Tim, if he

Truly does exist and is your sibling.

So cease all of your stalling and your quibbling.

I do not give a damn about your brother

nor the crash that killed your dad and mother.

Were you a man who lived respectably,

I’d gladly give you all my sympathy.

But you’re an incubus, a parasite,

And I intend to snuff you out tonight.

I plan to be as merciful as he

Who took the life of my true love Soon-Li.

What once Lord Byron said of his Corsair,

Is doubly true of my dear lover’s slayer:

‘And where his frown of hatred darkly fell

Hope, withering, fled – and Mercy sighed farewell.’

The man you spend your days romanticizing

I myself have spent eight years despising

And longing to snuff out the vile breath

Within his lungs and thus bring on his death.”

“Romanticizing!” Tom yelled with great force.

“Is that not what those lofty bards of yours

Did every time they lifted up a pen?
Did Byron not romanticize vile men?
I do not know his poem The Corsair,

But judging from the title it seems fair

To guess that there’s a pirate in the piece,

A man who rapes and plunders without cease.

You said yourself that ‘hatred’ marked his face.

From that I gather that his deeds were base.

And what about that legendary cad

Don Juan – were not his actions rather bad?
And wasn’t he romanticized in rhyme –

Despite being a total piece of slime –

By Byron, whom you worship and adore?

Surely there must be a thousand more

Unworthy cads immortalized in verse.

Did Robert Burns not fatten up his purse

By writing about bounders and seducers

And other types of misery-producers

Who prey upon the virtue of young lasses,

Plying them with drinks and making passes

Until at last the lassies raise their skirts

And get their molehills plundered till it hurts?

And nine months later do these vile dastards

Not disavow their squalling little bastards

And leave the maidens all alone to rear

Their offspring while the fathers swill their beer

And look about to see if they might spy

Another maiden firm of breast and thigh

Upon whom sweet attentions they can lavish,

Then sometime later take outside and ravish

Inside a barn or up against a gate

And dump when her next period is late?

In fact, did Robert Burns himself not sport

With maidens and then fail to support

The bastards that between them they begot,

Thus rendering the maidens quite distraught?

You said yourself that Byron, Shelley, Burns

Broke hearts and hymens frequently by turns,

Leaving in their wide and careless wakes

Young maids who paid quite dear for their mistakes.

And didn’t Wordsworth pretty much disown

Some woman back in France -- Annette Vallon? –

With whom he had a daughter or some sons?

I think I may have read about it once.

So how then can you label me worth killing

When all those bards whose lines you find so thrilling

Apparently were far worse men than I –

A fact which I defy you to deny.

These bounders scattered endless wild oats

Inside the fertile loins and barren throats

Of many most unfortunate young lasses,

Most of whom were from the lower classes

And not in a position to refuse

A gentleman or high-born noble whose

Servant girl they were, and so they spread

Their legs so’s not to lose their daily bread

And not because they really wanted to.

Does that sound very chivalrous to you?”

Miss Everheart had only one leg free.

She drew it forth and, chin resting on knee,

She wrapped her arms around her leg and for

Fifteen or twenty seconds, maybe more,

She pondered quietly what she’d just heard.

And by this silence Tom was reassured.

Perhaps, thought he, I’ve managed to get through

Her grief-born shell of madness and into

A deeper, saner portion of her mind,

A place inside her where perhaps she’ll find

Forgiveness, reason, logic, common sense

And realize how utterly immense

A folly it would be to shoot a man

Whose crimes are truly not much greater than

Those of Byron, her romantic idol.

To do so would be wholly suicidal.

The cops are sure to figure out in time

That she’s the one who’s guilty of a crime

And lock her up and throw away the key,

Or end her life with electricity,

A cloud of gas, a chemical injection.

Oh, God, I hope this quiet introspection

Will cause her to regain her sanity

And change the lethal plan she has for me.

But then, at last, she sighed and raised her head.

Tom looked into her eyes and there he read

His future in the coldness of her stare,

And once again was thrown into despair.

“There is a worthy argument, I’ll grant,

Buried in your largely pointless rant.

For sure, these men weren’t hermits, priests, or monks.

They climbed in many cots and beds and bunks

With women who were way beneath their stations

And entered into sexual relations.

Some of my beloved Romance heroes

In certain subjects earned a row of zeros:

Comportment, moderation, self-control –

No reputable teacher could extol

Their work in these arenas and bestow

A grade above the lowest of the low.

But even the worst scoundrels of the lot

Deserve our tolerance, for they begot

Poetic lines of beauty unsurpassed,

Great characters and stories that will last

As long as English literature is read,

As long as there’s a teardrop to be shed

For writing that’s replete with lyric art

And knowledge of the fragile human heart.

So if they made a shambles of their lives

And cheated on their mistresses and wives,

These men by me are nonetheless excused

Because of all the beauty they diffused.

What’s more, the accusations brought by you

Against my favorite poets aren’t all true.

In Byron’s version Don Juan’s not a cad

But just a most adventurous young lad,

More often being sinned against than sinning,

And often being bested, seldom winning.

And as for Burns, I can’t deny it’s true

He sired an out-of-wedlock child or two

(Some say the number’s six, some say thirteen;

The truth, I guess, lies somewhere in between,

Depending on how one defines what marriage is

And whether one counts stillbirths and miscarriages),

But he provided for them when he could

(His health was never really very good)

And was no hypocrite who fornicated

And then denied that he’d inseminated

The girl who was the mother of his bairn.

Explore his work and you’ll find proof therein

That Burns did not deny his fleshly side,

Nor from its consequences run and hide.

When his first child was born he proudly wrought her

A poem – “To His Love-Begotten Daughter.”

And far from thinking lechery was wrong.

He celebrated it in words and song.

And as for writing poems to fill his purse,

Your grasp of facts just couldn’t be much worse.

He lived his life in wretched poverty

And near starvation, so much so that he

Was dead at 37, broken down

By years of ploughing tracts of rented ground.

Subsistence farming was his lot in life.

With that he sought to feed his kids and wife.

His poems earned him little but esteem.

No one who’s truly fair could ever deem

His poetry an effort to get rich

By exploitation of the mis’ry which

Many of his countrymen (and –lasses),

Mostly of the low and laboring classes,

Experienced as part of daily life:

Near starvation, endless toil and strife.

Instead he sought to elevate the lots

Of all his fellow poor and hard-used Scotts

By capturing in verses and in songs

Their grand heroic struggles, and the wrongs

Perpetuated by their wealthy masters,

And turning these downtrodden folks’ disasters

Into such stuff that English politicians

On reading it might alter their positions

And stop the moneyed aristocracy

From hoarding all the wealth so greedily

And keeping the poor working people down.

No, Burns was no respecter of the crown.

He was a radical, a Jacobin

Who thought great wealth a truly evil sin.

He knew the struggles of the working folk

And in his writing frequently he spoke

Of how a life of endless toil can cause

A man to seek relief by breaking laws

Against such things as drunkenness and bedding

Women one has no intent of wedding.

He knew these things first hand. Like many Scots

By day he ploughed the fields, by night the twats

Of girls he would meet in public houses,

Some underage, and some with legal spouses.

He rarely had a decent meal to eat,

Why blame him, then, for seeking out a treat

Of luscious vittles in between the thighs

Of lovely girls, a meal that satisfies

The stomach not at all, but sates the mouth,

The eyes and other organs farther south.

His life was one of nearly constant woe

So if coition and fellatio

Helped elevate his spirits now and then

The way they do for many laboring men

And if he sometimes found his ‘hamely fare’

Surrounded by a girl’s maidenhair

More power to him. Who are you to say –

A spoiled child of the U.S.A.

Who’s never known the taste of real starvation –

That Burns’ appetite for fornication

Should have brought the man tremendous shame?

You’ve got no right to soil his lofty name.

He struggled manfully to leave behind

In language plain and largely unrefined,

In lines composed with unembellished grace,

A record of the noble Scottish race.

It wasn’t easy for him to remain

Loyal to his muse amid the strain

Of raising crops and managing a farm.

These labors did his spirit no end of harm.

Though Poetry and Poverty may sound

Related, they share little common ground.

One nourishes the soul and makes it bold,

The other sucks it dry and leaves it cold.

Not often do great works of poetry

Come flowing from the pen in penury.

The starving artist’s mostly just a fiction;

Hunger rarely hones a poet’s diction.

T’was Burns that Wordsworth thought of when he wrote:

(I’m not exactly certain of this quote)

‘We poets in our youth begin in gladness

But end our days in poverty and madness.’

Poor Burns once called his soul, while in a rage,

A wild finch imprisoned in a cage.

He understood that labor dull and menial

To poetry was not at all congenial,

And yet he soldiered on and with his words

Gave hope to all the other captured birds.

He used his gifts to fill the world with verse.

You prostituted yours to fill your purse.

So don’t you dare compare your sins to his

Or argue that because he spread his jizz

Inside the fleshy folds of many maids

Who joined with him in carnal escapades

That he deserves the condemnation of

The likes of me, or anything but love

From all who know the beauty and allure

Of great Romantic British literature.”

This lengthy speech filled Tom with desperation.

He sought, in vain, for further inspiration,

Some clever ruse to buy himself some time,

And yet he sat there silent as a mime,

A great communicator rendered mute

By terror grown increasingly acute.

His throat was dry. His tongue, it felt like lead,

And panic now began to fill his head.

There were no cue cards from which he could read,

No prompter in the wings to softly feed

His lines to him and get him through the scene.

What’s more, his skill at improv, once so keen,

Seemed suddenly to up and disappear,

Another victim of his crippling fear.

But well he knew he’d not survive the night

Nor be delivered from his current plight

Unless he kept on stalling her with chatter

The subject of which really didn’t matter

So long as it rang true and kept her brain

From fixating upon the quite insane

Idea that by killing him she’d lay

To rest the grief and anger and dismay

That since the tragic death of her best friend

Had made her life a nightmare without end.

And so with little hope and much despair

He plucked a random story from the air,

An anecdote about his early days

When he appeared in many obscure plays

At small non-profit theaters and such

That couldn’t pay their actors very much

But nonetheless were very helpful for

An actor who desired to learn more

About his craft than he could learn in class.

And so eventually it came to pass

That Tom attained what long had been his goal,

A chance to play a stage-show’s leading role.

It was a brand-new play, “Famine For One,”

About a prisoner who has begun

A hunger strike to protest the abuses

Inflicted by his guards, and so he loses

During the duration of the play

About a hundred pounds and wastes away

To skin and bones and dies in the last scene.

Because he was, back then, both young and lean,

Our Tom was deemed ideal for the part.

He wore a padded “fat suit” at the start

Of each performance, then between each scene

A costumer would alter Tom’s whole mien

By taking off a portion of the suit

Until at last the loss was absolute

And Tom, emaciated, lay abed

Till finally his character was dead.

It was a truly frightful transformation

And often drew a very large ovation

From audiences awestruck by the fact

That in between the first and final act

Tom took his character from big and stout

Down to a slender candle, burning out.

And then one day the costumer misplaced

The fat suit and Tom feared he’d be disgraced.

Appearing on the stage without that prop

Would guarantee the show to be a flop.

But Tom remembered reading long ago

How certain Indians slew buffalo.

Concealed in a buffalo’s dead hide

They’d try to lure some live ones to their side,

And when a decent herd had gathered round

They’d doff the hide and then the air would sound

With bows and arrows, rifles, even spears.

The greatest of these hunters, it appears,

Could will themselves while underneath the hide

To grow more tall and even grow more wide

Until at last they filled the empty skin

The way a hooker fills the clothes she’s in.

The Indians who chalked up the most kills

Were those who had the greatest acting skills.

And every now and then one played his part

So realistically, with such great art,

That some unwitting brother Indian

Would see the pelt that he was hidden in

And then, mistaking it for the real thing,

Would arrow up his bow and pull the string.

And when a hunter died like that he’d be

Assured a certain immortality

And celebrated in the tribal lore

As a sort of ghostly symbol for

The way a man of great artistic worth

Can alter our perceptions of the earth.

And Tom, deep down, believed that he was blest

With all the worth those Indians possessed.

And so he chose to play the role despite

The fact he’d have no padding on that night.

And proving the mind’s power over matter

He managed to convey that he was fatter

Than he really was and win applause

Where lesser actors might have earned guffaws.

“And that is when,” he told Miss Everheart,

“I learned about the awesome power of art.

And felt inside the truly splendid thrill

Of altering perceptions with one’s will.

And I decided that I’d rather die

A buffalo than live as just some guy

Who dons his costume and performs his role

But never truly stirs a living soul,

Who just collects his pay and plays his part

And never gives a damn for making art.

So, go ahead and scoff if you desire,

But I believe a true artistic fire

Has burned within my soul since I was born.

And though the fates see fit to always scorn

My efforts to achieve mainstream success,

I think I am an artist nonetheless.

It’s not a job – it’s who I am inside,

The only skill in which I take great pride.

And this may sound a bit vainglorious

But my portrayals of notorious

Mad slashers, killers, rapists, pedophiles

And other men society reviles

Are no less works of art than what you’d pay

A hundred bucks or more for on Broadway.

And twixt us two – the Broadway star and me –

My job’s by far more difficult, for he

Has numerous rehearsals, and each line

He speaks is written for him, whereas mine

Are almost always improvised, and so

I’ve really got to intimately know

The characters I play inside and out.

I cannot simply memorize and spout

The words of some great Broadway dramatist,

As on the arm of his ventriloquist

A wooden dummy moves his mouth in sync

With someone else’s words – no, I must think

And feel and live and breathe the roles I play

And ad-lib almost every word I say.

There truly cannot be too many harder

Ways to make a living. Only ardor

As great as any mother’s for her baby

Has kept me going on – the hope that maybe

If I keep persevering I’ll at last

Be made a leading member of the cast

Of some big Broadway hit, perhaps a show

That runs for seven years on HBO,

An Oscar-winning film by Tarantino,

A musical revue at some casino

In Vegas doing several shows a day

And bringing home, for once, some decent pay.

For now, however, I must bide my time

Portraying men who’ve led a life of crime

For lonely gals infatuated by

The kind of scum most people vilify.

And yes, perhaps it might be just a bit

Unseemly, but I swear to you I’d quit

This instant if a better gig arose.

But beggars can’t be choosers, heaven knows,

And for the nonce the only thing that keeps

A roof above my head is playing creeps

Like Harvey Prine. So how can you blame me

For doing what I do? Why can’t you see

That I’m an artist who for years has courted

Better roles but always I’ve been thwarted

By nepotism, cronyism, and

Some other isms? Don’t you understand

That I, in some ways, am your kindred spirit,

Even though may not want to hear it?

We both for years have eagerly pursued

Our dreams of glory only to be screwed

By circumstances we could not control,

You by Soon-Li’s murder and the hole

It left within you. Me by all the ways

True artistry’s neglected nowadays

In favor of that vast conformist herd

Of well-connected clones whose work’s preferred

By all those MBAs and CEOs

Who run the theaters and studios.

And thus it makes no sense at all for you

To take my life because of what I do,

When what I do, I do only because

I am an actor and I need applause,

And if I cannot get it from a crowd

Of movie-goers clapping long and loud

Or stage-show-viewers rising to their feet

And screaming till they’re redder than a beet,

Then I must get it anywhere I can,

Even on a living-room divan

Inside a small apartment or a house,

From women who, because they lack a spouse,

Employ me for an evening’s company.

You say it’s tawdry, and I quite agree,

But seeing all these sad and lonely-eyed

Unmarried ladies beaming satisfied

Expressions at me when we are together

Helps to brighten my interior weather

And, after I’ve been at it several hours,

Confirm my judgment of my acting powers.

Each smile, each sigh, each breathless little pause

That I elicit feels just like applause,

And validates me in a tiny way

That must suffice until that happy day

When I at last receive my lucky break

And at a casting call I chance to make

A big impression on some mucky-mucks

Who hire me and pay me megabucks

To star beside Pacino and DeNiro

(They’ll play the bad guys and I’ll play the hero)

Upon the silver screen in some new flick

That makes me rich and famous super-quick.

But as you know an artist’s dreams of glory

Can oftentimes prove purely fabulatory

(Is that a word? If not, it ought to be,

An adjective for folks like you and me

To use when we describe our hopes and schemes),

But as I said, an artist’s fondest dreams

Quite often go awry or bear no fruit

Or else grow threadbare like a ragged suit

The dreamer has been wearing for too long

It’s stitching once so intricate and strong

Now starting to unravel at the seams.

That’s how it feels – the fading of one’s dreams.

When I first donned the guise of Harvey Prine

Those show-biz aspirations of mine

Had grown so thin and threadbare, heaven knows,

That had they truly been a suit of clothes

And I been forced to wear them every day

My nakedness would be put on display

For all the world to see, and I would be

Exposed as a pathetic nullity.

And thus it was in utter desperation

That I took up this present occupation.

And since you are yourself an artist too

I believe the least that you should do

Is show a bit of sympathy, for I

Am but a fellow dreamer, gone awry.”

This stirring speech appeared, alas, to make

No great impression on the icy lake

That was the surface of Miranda’s face,

Upon which Tom saw not a single trace

Of mercy or compassion or of pity

(Though, curiously, he still found it pretty).

No ripple of forgiveness creased the water

Of Albion’s lone surviving daughter.

Miranda pushed her hair behind her ears.

Her chilly smile magnified Tom’s fears.

“It doesn’t really matter much to me

If what you say is true, about how we

Are kindred spirits because in our hearts

We share a fierce attachment to the arts.

Where Love and Art collide, Love always wins.

And now it’s time to pay for all your sins.

Should I show weakness now by sparing you

The fate you well deserve, I’d be untrue

To she whose love was all the world to me

And such a callous act of treachery

Against the one to whom I pledged my love

I swear I never shall be guilty of.

I guess it’s just your rotten luck that I’m

Not possessed of Soon-Li’s gift for rhyme.

No doubt, if I’d died first, my memory

She would have honored with some poetry

Of stunning beauty, epic in its breadth.

All I can honor hers with is your death.

Now cease this endless whining and prepare

To meet the fate you’ve long deserved to share

With Harvey Prine, your role model and twin

(He does the crimes, you do the cashing in).

Together you comprise the very worst

Of humankind. But you shall be the first

To pay society for all you’ve done

When I pull back the trigger of this gun.”

His panic rising, Tom threw out another

Pathetic reference to his baby brother.

“But if I die my brother Jim will be

Left bereft of all his family.

Can you really do that to a boy

Whose life so far has held so little joy?”

“You said his name was Tim. That proves your lie!”

“His name is Timothy James and that is why

I sometimes call him Jim and sometimes Tim.

At times I even call the boy Tim-Jim.”

“I don’t believe you, but it doesn’t matter.

I still intend to see your brains besplatter

The wall behind that chair in which you sit,

You dirty rotten worthless piece of shit.”

At this point Tom could no longer maintain

Control over his tongue or of his brain.

“You crazy fucking bitch, goddamn your eyes!

I’d love to spread apart those frigid thighs

And shove a red-hot poker up the hole

That Soon-Li once referred to as your mole.

You’re nothing but a selfish little dyke

Whose feelings for Soon-Li are nothing like

True love or even deep infatuation

But rather just a rationalization

For wallowing in self-indulgent pity

And crying, ‘Oh, the world’s so cruel and shitty.

It’s crushed my dreams and stamped out all my hope.

I think I’ll just become a misanthrope

And lock my heart up in an iron cage

And when I feel a flaring up of rage

I’ll use the death of my old friend Soon-Li

To justify whatever villainy

My tortured soul would like to perpetrate

In order to assuage this burst of hate.’

But you cannot do honor to Soon-Li

By perpetrating in her memory

Horrendous acts of violence and vengeance

Against whatever unfortunate men chance

To cross your path when you are in the mood

To taste a bit of moral turpitude.

If Soon-Li was as special as you say

She’d never want to be used in this way.

You blacken her good name and reputation

By using her as your justification

For giving in to all your violent urges.

Crimes of hate and violence are scourges

Of civilized society and I

Cannot believe that your friend Soon-Li Pai

Would want her memory tarnished by these acts.

I do not know a great number of facts

About her, but it sounds as if she doted

On all those Romance poets that you quoted.

And Romance poetry is usually

Both rhymed and metered very carefully,

And so I’d guess that Soon-Li had a strong

Belief in rules, preferred right to wrong,

A passion for tradition and for order.

Your actions, if you ask me, truly border

On a desecration of her whole

Way of life, her spirit, and her soul.

She longed to fill the world with great art,

You merely want to tear the world apart.

So go ahead and shoot me if you dare,

But don’t pretend that it’s because you care

About Soon-Li so much that I must die.

We both know that is nothing but a lie.

By killing me you’ll just perpetuate

The cycle of both violence and hate

That Misty Li so long ago set off

Because some poor deluded frosh or soph

Unwittingly provoked her enmity

By asking if he might accompany

Her highness to the next high-school dance

Thus setting off a chain of circumstance

That led to many deaths and still today

Goes on and on and in a moment may

Produce another needless death – my own.

But killing me will not help you atone

For Soon-Li’s death. The second that you pull

That trigger and you blow apart my skull

Like glass that’s shattered by some diva’s trilling

You make yourself, by virtue of that killing,

A veritable doppelganger of

The man who killed your one and only love,

You leave behind the spirit of Soon-Li

And bind yourself through all eternity

Not unto poetry and things divine

But to that pestilential Harvey Prine,

And all the things that his type represents,

Like murder, torture, rape and violence.

Your nemesis, archenemy, bete noire

Will thus become yourself. Bid au revoir

To any hope you had of finding peace,

An inner calm that might help to release

Your lyric muse and cause the words to spill

Forth from your pen. The moment that you kill

My sorry ass you also write finis

To any bit of immortality

You hoped to gain for Soon-Li and yourself

Upon that relatively small bookshelf

That holds the poems that will never die,

All those sonnets that were written by

The likes of Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Millay,

The Song of Roland, Elegy by Gray,

The Faerie Queen, The Idylls of the King,

Romance of the Rose, The Book and the Ring,

The Rape of Lucrece, The Rape of the Lock,

That poem about the Jabberwock,

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell,

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Isolde,

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

The Lady in the Lake, Evangeline –

When you align yourself with Harvey Prine

Your long-held dream of writing down your name

Into that book of everlasting fame

Will vanish like a snowflake in the sun.

Eventually the scope of what you’ve done

Will come to haunt your dreams and sap your brain

Of everything but guilt and fear and pain.

The knowledge of this truly awful deed

Will spread throughout your mind just like a weed

And choke off all of that tranquility

That’s vital to one’s creativity.

Your epic poem will never be produced.

Your dear Soon-Li will not be introduced

To future generations by your verses.

Instead you will produce mere oaths and curses

And crumpled balls of paper by the ton.

The wastebasket will be the only one

Receptive to your literary fare.

So go ahead and shoot me if you dare.

But if you do the bullet that you use

Will also blow a hole right through your muse

And render her as dead as Soon-Li Pai.

And when she goes, your dreams will also die.

Perhaps you’d like to take a little time

To ponder what I’ve said about this crime

That you’re about to perpetrate on me.

If so, go right ahead. And please feel free

To put the gun away. I will not try

To flee while you consider all that I

Have said to you. I’m confident that as

You mull my argument you’ll see it has

A vast amount of commonsense in it.

So put aside your anger for a minute,

And contemplate the words that I’ve just said

And roll my thoughts around inside your head,

Eventually I think you will agree,

You’re going to kill your dreams by shooting me,”

Said Tom. But she was having none of it.

“Oh, fuck that stupid psychobabble shit,”

Said Annabelle Miranda Everheart.

“Your rhetoric’s as gassy as a fart.

A lot of our best stories and best rhymes

Have come from writers guilty of great crimes.

The beatnik writer Burroughs killed his wife

And claimed the act improved his writing life.

He said, I quote: ‘The death of Joan brought me

Into a lifelong struggle from which I see

No pathway out except by writing books,”

Or words to that effect. And other crooks

And killers have been able to compose

Immortal works of poetry and prose.

The Thief’s Journal by Frenchman Jean Genet

Is autobiographical, they say.

Apparently his many acts of theft

Did not leave him creatively bereft.

And using one of his best kitchen knives,

Norman Mailer stabbed one of his wives.

She nearly joined the naked and the dead.

Happily, Norm’s best work still lay ahead.

Sir Thomas Malory wrote much of Morte

D’Arthur doing time for every sort

Of crime that you can name, the dirty creep,

From burglary and rape to stealing sheep.

And yet his masterpiece, ironically,

Is England’s greatest work on chivalry.

Chaucer was called by a court to explain

His role in the ‘raptus’ of Madame Chaumpaigne.

Nobody now knows what ‘raptus’ once meant,

But if it was ‘rape’ he was surely no gent.

Edward ‘the Earl of Oxford’ de Vere,

Whom some think authored the works of Shakespeare,

Once murdered an unarmed man with a sword

And swore to a judge that the victim had gored

Himself by running at full speed into

The deadly blade. The Earl also slew

Three men in duels, perhaps even more.

He, too, bedded wenches and maids by the score.

Cervantes, Milton, Dante, Defoe,

Dostoevsky, even lovable O.

Henry – all these men at various times

Were jailed, fined, or exiled for their crimes.

And then of course there’s the Marquis de Sade

Whose crimes were numerous and very odd.

He drugged some servant girls and fucked their bottoms.

His book 120 Days of Sodom’s

The product of this curious ‘research.’

Few writers have been sainted by the church.

They’re rogues and scallywags and pompous asses,

They knock up girls of the lower classes,

As you yourself tonight have pointed out.

Typically, a writer’s no boy scout.

He lies and cheats and steals and beats his wife

And makes a total shambles of his life.

The pain and guilt and shame that come his way

Don’t cause his writing skills to go astray.

He uses them and they become a part

Of every piece of literary art

That he produces: sonnet, essay, play,

Short story, epic verse, roman a clef.

It’s nuts to think that only if he’s pure

Of heart and soul can worthy literature

Come flowing from a would-be writer’s pen.

All sorts of vile dames and roguish men

Have left the world a masterpiece or two.

I shan’t be fazed at all by killing you.

In fact, I’m hoping that by dawn tomorrow

I’ll begin emerging from the sorrow

That’s gagged my writing voice for many years

And drowned my peace of mind in salty tears.

Now cease your unbecoming simpering

Excuses, lies, and endless whimpering.

Don’t just sit and cower in that chair.

Get up, breathe deep, and fill your lungs with air.

Why not attempt a mad dash for the door,

Or charge at me and give a mighty roar?

You’ve lived your life the lowest of the low,

Why not go out of it a buffalo?”

But Tom was too afraid to make a dash.

He feared that in his panic he might crash

Into the bed and fall down on his face

And die there in a state of sheer disgrace.

He hoped that if he sat and talked some more

Miss Everheart might open up the door

Eventually and let him walk away,

Perhaps when night gave way to light of day.

And so he sat as if his legs were lame.

“No guts?” she said, and shrugged. “Why, that’s a shame.

I’d hoped that in your final moments you’d

Cast off your reprehensible and crude

Resemblance to that asshole Harvey Prine,

Cease to be a worm and grow a spine,

Stand up and take responsibility

For all your crimes with quiet dignity.

I’d hoped that in these last few painful hours

You might have gained some self-reflective powers,

Enough to help you see just what a scum

Your greed and ego’ve led you to become,

And realizing this might say to me,

‘You’re right, Miss Everheart. Alas, I see

That I assuredly deserve to die.

I used the tragic death of Soon-Li Pai

To line my pockets with ill-gotten gains.

My hands, although they bear no bloody stains,

Are just as dirty as the hands of he

Who stabbed her with a knife repeatedly.

Quit toying with that trigger now and pull it,

Deliver me from evil with a bullet.

I did the crime and now at last I’m ready

To pay the price. Please keep your gun hand steady.

All I ask of you is to refrain

From needlessly inflicting excess pain.’

But rather than be brave or even ballsy,

You sit there like a victim of the palsy,

Unable to do anything but shake

Just like the tail of a rattlesnake.

But do not worry, I’ve got just the thing

To end forever all your quivering.

She raised the gun, her aim was straight and true.

“Soon-Li,” she whispered, “this I do for you.”

She pulled the trigger thrice and Boom! Boom! Boom!

Three shots rang out and echoed round the room.

And on the plaster wall behind Tom’s head,

Three roses bloomed a bright and bloody red.

Miss Everheart put down the smoking gun,

Picked up the phone and dialed 911.

“Oh, God!,” she said, “please send a cop car quick.

I think that I am going to be sick.

A man broke in my house tonight and tried

To rape me. But while he securely tied

My left foot to the bedpost I reached for

A gun that I keep hidden in a drawer.

I forced him to sit down upon a chair.

I told him to not to budge an inch from there.

But when I tried to dial 911

He reached into his waistband for a gun.

I shot him several times and now he’s lying

Upon the carpet, either dead or dying.

I’m all tied up. I don’t know what to do.

Please hurry up and send a car or two.

I live in Oak Tree Ridge, on Shady Lane.

A condo project, two blocks south of Main.

My address here is 106, and there’s

A door key hidden underneath the stairs

That lead to my front porch. It’s in a rock

That’s hollowed out inside, and fits the lock

To my front door. Oh god I’m really feeling

Sick and now the room seems like it’s reeling.

I think I’m going to faint. I can’t go on.

Please hurry up, my strength is now all gone.”

She tossed the phone behind her on the bed.

It landed by a pillow for her head.

She lay back then and felt an inner peace

Wash over her. She let herself release

The anger and the hatred and the fears

Her soul had been tormented by for years.

A smile slowly spread across her face.

She felt a certain onrushing of grace,

And satisfaction settled like a dove

Upon a heart now overflowed with love.

“I did it all for you, my dear Soon-Li,

So that your restless soul could be set free

From sorrow and an endless longing for

Revenge against the wicked one who tore

Your lips and fingertips apart from mine.

I’ve killed a man who looked like Harvey Prine

In order to avenge symbolically

The hateful crime that temporarily

Has robbed us of those things that use to bring us

Such ecstasy, like doing cunnilingus

Upon each other’s tasty little moles,

The books we read together, and the strolls

We’d take along the downtown city streets

And all those hours of fun between the sheets.

So let your spirit soar; do not repine.

Some day your lips and breasts will meet with mine.

For now the two of us will have to take

Solace in the fact that our heartbreak

Has been avenged in blood and tears and sweat,

And – judging from the smell – some shit, I’ll bet.

Oh god, I wish that you’d been here to see.

I think that you’d have been real proud of me.

I made that worthless bastard twist and squirm,

Then killed him like the plow cuts through the worm.

I tortured him for hours with my chat,

The way a mouse is tortured by a cat.

I let him think it possible he might

Somehow escape the nightmare of his plight

With bullshit or with promises to mend

His wicked ways, or stories without end

About his sorry lot in life, the way

His acting dreams all fizzled out, the day

His parents both were killed, a fictional brother

In need of help with money, many other

Pathetic tales of the numerous woes

That forced him (most reluctantly) to pose

As Harvey Prine and other very vicious

Men whose crimes were cruel and malicious,

Just so that he could earn a little cash.

Then in the end I gleefully did smash

All his hopes of freedom and release.

I said he was a miserable piece

Of shit and that I planned to shoot him dead.

And then I put three bullets through his head.

Oh, god, Soon-Li you should have felt the thrill

That rippled through my body with that kill.

‘Much sooner stab a child in its bed

Then nurse repressed desires in your head.’

When our inspired ‘father’ William Blake

Expressed that (mangled) thought, make no mistake,

He knew what he was saying, for it’s true:

To live with pent-up wants and not pursue

A way to satisfy them is the worst

Fate with which a soul can be accursed.

If ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than

The horses of instruction,’ (and I am an

Affirmed believer in that line of Blake’s)

Then the acts of vengeance one undertakes

In wrathfulness are not a crime at all

But just a form of intellectual

Exercise both healthy and fulfilling.

That’s how I felt tonight after the killing.

My brain was filled with sudden clarity,

And all my wrathful tygers were set free.

And here I lie in peacefulness at last

My vengefulness a relic of the past.”

And then she took a breath and shut her eyes

And put a finger down between her thighs.

Some time went by before she was aware

Of a stranger’s voice adrift in the air:

“Oh, Miss, I am still waiting on this line.

What’s that you said about a Harvey Prine

Look-alike you murdered in his stead?

You say you put three bullets in his head?

My god, is this some grisly type of game?

You killed a man because he looked the same

As some demented killer locked in jail?

Never have I heard so strange a tale.

All units now en route to Shady Lane:

Be wary, we’ve a possibly insane

Killer in the condo with a weapon.

Take extra caution that you do not step in

To a trap she may have set for you.

It sounds as if she may have one or two

Confederates inside the house. I heard

(I can’t be sure of this, the words were slurred)

A reference to a man called William Blake,

And someone named Soon-Li. Repeat, please take

Great care when you arrive upon the scene.

This Blake sounds very dangerous and mean.

According to the things the caller said,

He may have stabbed a child in its bed…

CANTO III

“Not guilty,” the jurors unanimously

Responded, “because of insanity.”

For two solid weeks they had listened with care

To numerous folks in the witness chair:

Her father, her mother, an uncle, an aunt,

Her recent employer, old Mr. Gandt,

A couple of classmates, Lucinda and Jewel,

Who tried to befriend Miranda in school,

Ms. Madison-Smythe, her former Art teacher

Who wanted to help but never could reach her,

Her two next door neighbors, Bill Ross and Ann Flynn,

The proprietor of the Boar’s Head Inn,

A deacon (her family were Methodists),

And two court-appointed psychiatrists.

One after the other each one of them said

That “Annabelle” seemed to go out of her head

After the death of her old friend Soon-Li

And withdraw into silence and poetry.

“She always had been an excitable girl.

Crazy ideas were always a-swirl

Deep in that fanciful noggin of hers,

But I’d never known her to care much for verse

Till after the murder of Soon-Li Pai,

At which point she started to deify

People like Wordsmith, Coldridge, and Scott,

And got lost in all of that Romantic rot.”

These few words of her heartbroken mother’s

Were echoed by almost all of the others.

Ms. Madison-Smythe then came to the stand,

A bundle of papers clutched in her hand.

“I have here a book the defendant created

When I was her teacher. She illustrated

Each of its pages and wrote every line.

Called ‘Sonnets on Loss,’ it’s a favorite of mine.

But reading it now beneath the harsh light

Projected by Annabelle’s current sad plight

It tends, as I see it, to validate

The notion that Annabelle’s mental state

Since high school has been unhealthily

Obsessed with dream lovers and fantasy.”

She turned to the judge, “May I read one?” she said.

There were no objections. He nodded his head.

With a tear in her eye and a catch in her throat,

She started to read what Annabelle wrote:

“The last dream of the night, the poets say,

The one that comes the moment just before

You wake to face the dawning of the day,

Unlike the rest, is no mere metaphor.

It will not turn to vapor in the air

Or crumble like a castle made of sand,

And leave you to awaken in despair

Just as the sea reclaims your fairyland.

And every night I hope that dream will be

A vision of the two of us once more

Rejoicing in each other’s company,

Our battlements still strong above the shore.

But every dawn I dream the same old thing:

The one about the sad and homeless king.”

She then proceeded to recite six more:

Pavane For a Dead Princess, At Death’s Door,

The Fall of Albion: An Elegy,

Around her neck she wore a tiny key,

The Grave of a Poet Who Died Too Soon,

And Once as we lay naked ‘neath the moon.

Ms. Madison-Smythe concluded her reading

By wiping a teardrop her eye was secreting.

The folks in the jury, the folks in the crowd

Were blowing their noses and weeping aloud.

Seeing the courtroom’s decorum unravel

The judge called for silence and pounded his gavel.

Miranda’s attorney had played his last ace.

He stood up and said, “The defense rests its case.”

After a token discussion, the jury

Arrived at a verdict as if in a hurry

To spare the defendant any more pain.

“Not guilty,” they said. “The girl’s insane.”

A fortnight thereafter she was committed

To a hospital for the feeble-witted

And others whose judgment and lack of sense

Hinted at mental incompetence.

The Anne LeBeuf Asylum For The Care

Of Insane Women it was called, and there

Were several hundred inmates locked within

From teenagers who liked to cut their skin

And schizophrenics doped on Thorazine,

To nymphomaniacs and Benzadrine-

Addicted movie starlets, anorectics,

Several paranoids and apoplectics,

A gal who thought her cat was Lady Di,

Fraternal twins convinced that they could fly,

A wealthy matron terrified of eggs,

Another who preserved her shit in bags

And thought the CIA controlled her will

With satellite transmissions from Brazil,

An alcoholic with severe d.t.s,

A science-fiction fan who feared E.T.s,

In order to perpetuate their breed,

Were out to fill her snatchbox with their seed,

A coprolaliac whose every word

Was “shit” or “piss” or “fuck” or “cunt” or “turd,”

A spinster prone to sudden fear attacks,

Three acrophobes, six kleptomaniacs,

Two tickling fetishists, a coprophage,

Some urophiliacs (those who engage

Erotically with others’ urinations).

Miranda liked her new accommodations.

She loved the long, white, marble-tiled halls.

She loved the rustic murals on the walls.

She loved the many gently rolling hills

From which she heard the warbles and the trills

Of nightingale, robin, wren, and lark

In early morn and evening before dark.

She loved the private room she occupied

(Although she wished the door locked from inside).

She didn’t mind the food; it wasn’t bad.

She didn’t mind the many rules they had:

No running in the halls, Lights out by nine

(excepting nyctophobes), No beer or wine

Or any kind of alcoholic drink,

Do not wash your stockings in the sink,

No after-hours visitors, No walking

Outside after dark, No Pets, No Talking

Inside the reading room, No Smoking Please.

Miranda wasn’t bothered much by these.

In fact, she was annoyed by just one thing.

Her doctors had forbidden her to bring

A single work of Romance literature.

These experts had been relatively sure

Exposure to more Byron and more Blake

Would be a grave and dangerous mistake,

Inclined to cause unhealthy stimulation

Of the patient’s sick imagination.

Curiously the doctors didn’t mind

If she read almost any other kind

Of literature, and thus she was allowed

Access to a rather motley crowd

Of scribbling men and women: Plato,

Nietzsche, Aristotle, Kant, and Cato,

Marlowe, Rimbaud, Li Po, and Thoreau,

Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Jacques Rousseau

(These last two both Romantic icons, yet,

Because they were not Brits, the doctors let

Miranda read their works, apparently

Believing Romance Lit exclusively

The product of a tiny group of men

All of whom employed a British pen).

Schiller, Stendahl, Tolstoy, Socrates –

Her parents sent her books by all of these.

Celine, John Lock, Meander, Mallarme,

Racine, Spinoza, Lucan, Rabelais,

Petrarch, Homer, Virgil, Cicero,

Dickens, Dickinson, Boccaccio,

Some fellow known as Shakespeare (heard of him?)

The Dumas, pere and fils, the Brothers Grimm,

Both Brownings, both Fieldings, both Trollope’s, the three

Brontes, the Rossettis and the PRB,

Mary Wollstonecraft (but not Mary Shelley),

Catullus, Kipling, Machiavelli,

Aeschylus, Plutarch, Pindar, Montaigne,

The anonymous author of Sir Gawain –

So many books was she allowed to read

That after several months she lost the need

For daily hits of Wordsworth, Blake, and Clare

And found her bliss instead in other fare.

And so she spent her time at Anne LeBeuf

Perusing Hamlet, Phedre, and Tartuffe,

Prometheus Unbound, Antigone,

The Iliad and The Odyssey,

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela,

And Fielding’s much slenderer Shamela,

Boccaccio and his great Decameron,

Marguerite de Navarre’s The Heptameron,

Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique,

Still more translations from the ancient Greek:

The Wasps, The Birds, The Frogs, The Clouds, and Peace

(She had a thing for Aristophanes).

And yet her favorite reading at this time

Was Dante’s Comedia, a sublime

Amalgam of the sacred and profane

That stirred her soul and tantalized her brain.

She read it over and over again

In English translations by various men.

She thought of her life as a variation

(Or maybe a badly mangled translation)

Of Dante’s long story of those who dwell

In Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell.

Her Paradiso was the time she had wiled

Away with Soon-Li when she was a child.

Her Inferno all those years in between

Soon-Li’s murder, so vile and obscene,

And the symbolic act that helped her atone

For leaving Soon-Li to face it alone.

And now in this bucolic resting-home she

Was trapped in a form of Purgatory.

She daily devoured thousands of words

Outside in the park, surrounded by birds,

Or up in a sunny cupola where

The staff had installed a comfortable chair.

Six years went by. They were pleasant but dull.

Her life seemed stalled in a permanent lull.

And then one day when she was twenty-nine,

While standing in the noontime luncheon line,

She saw an unknown patient in the queue

And suddenly the world seemed fresh and new.

The girl was perfect: young, slim, and fair,

With pale white skin and buttery hair.

Her wrists and her arms were unmarked by scars

Of the kind that often violently mars

The flesh of young girls confused by their lives

Who try to find answers with razors and knives.

But since this patient clearly was no cutter,

Miranda simply could not fathom what her

Condition was that brought her to this place,

Or why she wore such sorrow on her face.

She followed as the girl made her way,

While carrying a plastic meal tray,

On over to the far side of the room

And settled down to eat in quiet gloom.

Miranda sat down in a nearby seat,

And said, “Hello. Do you mind if I eat

Beside you here? Your face is new to me,

And I could use some pleasant company.”

The girl shrugged and tried to force a smile.

“It’s fine with me. Go on and sit awhile.

But I don’t know how pleasant it will be.

I’m not renowned for sociability.”

And those few words became the opening of

Miranda’s next – and last – great earthly love.

The newcomer’s name was Allison Fyfe.

She told Miranda the facts of her life.

But this didn’t happen immediately,

For Allison didn’t make friends easily.

It took Miranda three weeks to discover

The history of this soon-to-be-lover.

Allison’s parents were liberal, rich,

And prone to scatterbrained notions, of which

One of the oddest was their belief that

Their daughter should go to high school at

The area’s worst and most dangerous school.

“In order to make of you somebody who’ll

Know how the poor people live, learn, and play,

And get through the trials they face every day,

We’re sending you way across town to a place

Where most of the students aren’t of your race

Or upper-class background, but rather come

From ghetto, barrio, project, or slum.

Your father and I are both hoping this plan

Will help to expand your horizons more than

An upper-class prep school, no matter how good,

Or well-intentioned it is, ever could.

Later in life, this experience may

Prove to be helpful if, god willing, some day

You go into politics or else the Law

And bolstered by all of the things that you saw

During those years that you spent with the poor

Commit yourself wholly to improving things for

Those who because they’re Hispanic or black

Or maybe because their families lack

Both money and status, can’t ever seem

To capture a share of the American Dream.

We’re hoping you’ll use your education

To fight for things like desegregation

Of schools and country clubs, boardrooms too.

Oh, honey, we’re both so excited for you.

It’ll be wonderful. Trust me. I’m sure.”

That’s how her mother explained it to her.

But her parents were rather utopian.

This idea of theirs was a dopey one.

It backfired badly, and Allie became,

Much to her parents’ horror and shame,

A girl who felt anxiety in

The presence of people with brown or black skin.

She found herself being tormented by

A schoolmate named N’keesha McFly.

N’Keesha resented Allison’s rich

Parents and called her a “snooty white bitch.”

One day in the locker room after P.E.

N’Keesha filled up a cup with her pee.

Then three of her posse held Allison down

And said, “We gone beat you if you make a soun.”

N’Keesha then told her, “Drink down this piss

Or else I’m gone kill you. You got that Miss Priss?”

Allison fought them with all that she had

But the grip of her captors was iron-clad.

As hard as she struggled to loosen their grip

She just couldn’t give her attackers the slip.

N’Keesha got angry and pulled out a knife.

“Which will it be: the piss or your life?”

Allison, terrified nearly to death,

Nodded her head and then took a deep breath.

Her captors eased up and let her arms free.

N’Keesha gave over the cup with the pee.

Allison swallowed the liquid with haste,

Hoping this method might lessen the taste.

Afterwards, lying in shame on the floor,

She listened to all of her enemies roar

With laughter that burned poor Allison’s ears

And brought to her eyes a torrent of tears.

That night, after dinner, she told her father

About the ordeal. “It sounds quite a bother,”

He told her without much apparent alarm.

“But I doubt that it did any serious harm.

We must learn to make some exceptions for those

Who are victims of various social woes,

Like racism, poverty, fatherlessness.

I don’t know for sure but am willing to guess

That N’Keesha’s a victim of all these things.

Try to befriend her and see what it brings.

If that doesn’t work, perhaps then you ought

To avoid the girl. Try not to get caught

In a situation that brings to the fore

The fact that you’re rich and white, while she’s poor.

Try dressing like they do. Try blending in.

Lie out in the sun and darken your skin.

Adopting their habits and manners of speech

After a while might help you to reach

A kind of accord – or détente, if you will –

With the blacks and Hispanics, and help to instill

A sense of harmoniousness that transcends

Your various backgrounds and makes you all friends.

Remember, my dear, in all of your dealings

With the underprivileged, consider their feelings

And do not take it so personally

If you find that they occasionally

Perceive you as an emblem of your race

And call you names or spit into your face.”

Her father ran the Sociology

Department at a University.

Her mother had inherited a chain

Of shopping malls, and several sugar cane

Plantations on a South Pacific isle,

Two grocery stores, eleven family-style

Pizza restaurants, and seven Audi

Dealerships. She sold them to a Saudi

For a fortune at the age of twenty-three.

But still she didn’t like to think that she

Was in or of the nation’s the ruling-class,

A coterie that she considered crass.

She hated all of those “phony limousine

Liberals” but lived just like a queen.

“I believe in Marxism,” she’d say.

But rarely did she give a cent away.

And that is why it thrilled her to reveal,

“My daughter is a student at a real

public school, filled with lower-class

Minorities. For we believe, alas,

Unless enlightened people just like us

Allow their kids to travel on a bus

Into the very bowels of despair

And go to school in a setting where

They daily are exposed to all the woe

And hardship that these people undergo,

Never can we make this world a place,

Where everyone regardless of her race

Can grow up to be proud and strong and smart

And make her way in any field or art

That she herself has chosen to pursue.

It’s children of the upper-classes who

Grow up to guard the country’s social gates,

Playing God with other people’s fates.

Perhaps if more of them, like Allison,

Had gone to public schools, everyone

Would have an equal opportunity

To get ahead in this society.

Probably that’s way too much to ask,

But we, at least, are working at the task.”

Because they harbored attitudes like these,

Their daughter was afraid it would displease

The two of them if she should ever voice

Her hatred and her loathing of DuBois

Magnet School for the Central City.

They’d say she was indulging in self-pity

And giving into prejudice and fear.

“A lot of students find their freshman year

The toughest of them all,” her dad would say.

“Hang in there and before the end of May

I bet you’ll feel at home there and that you’ll

Have formed a lot of friendships at the school,

And then you will be glad you didn’t quit.”

Or some such Sociology bullshit.

But after the N’Keesha incident

Her life at school very quickly went

From bad to worse. Now every body’d hiss

“There goes the girl who drank N’Keesha’s piss”

Behind her back whenever she passed by.

And soon another girl took a try

At forcing Allison to swallow down

A cup of her disgusting yellow-brown

Lukewarm urine. Allison resisted.

But, like N’Keesha, this girl was assisted

By several very brawny friends of hers.

Eventually this band of torturers

Forced Allison into a bathroom stall

And pinned her up against a tile wall.

They punched her till her mouth flew open wide

And then they poured Juanita’s piss inside.

From that point onward Allison did not

Resist at all whenever she was caught

By dark-skinned girls brandishing a cup

Of urine and demanding she drink up.

She drank the piss of Blacks and Filipinas

And more than half a dozen young Latinas

(A Mexican and twins from Salvador,

Two Guatemalans, three from Ecuador).

By day their mothers washed the urine stains

From white men’s dirty briefs, and cleaned the panes

Of windows in a wide array of houses

Owned by wealthy lawyers and their spouses.

They scrubbed the floors, they polished silverware,

They cooked the food and handled child care,

While, off and on, deflecting the advances

Of horny husbands and the leering glances

Of teenage boys with hunger in their eyes

And stiffened bulges pressed against their thighs.

Some fathers of these girls picked the beans,

The spinach, artichokes, and other greens

That kept these wealthy white folk eating well

Though all the time complaining, “Why the hell

Has Congress let the world’s greatest nation

Be ruined by illegal immigration?”

And when these young Latinas tried to seek

Employment of their own they’d have to speak

To some white guy who ran the personnel

Department, and he’d tell them, “Mirabel

(Carmella, Amaranta, Luz, Ynez)

I know da sign out front da building sez

We’re hiring, but really dat’s not so.

In fact, we’ve had to let some people go.

Perhaps we’ll have a job to offer youse

(Ynez, Carmella, Amaranta, Luz)

If you return in April or in May,

But we’re fresh out of openings today,”

Then fifteen minutes later, maybe fewer,

In strolls another eager job-pursuer

Who’s hired on the spot because he’s white

And told that he can start to work that night.

And thus it cheered these angry girls up

To fill a cola can or Dixie cup

With urine and then force some rich, white girl

To drink it down while trying not to hurl.

Sometimes they’d splash a little on her dress.

It made them feel not quite so powerless

To pass a blue-eyed blondie in the hall,

So privileged and Caucasian and so tall,

And notice little droplets of their pee

Were splattered on her clothes for all to see.

In some odd way it helped atone a bit

For all the nasty piss and sweat and shit

Their mothers had to deal with at work

While fending off the gropings of some jerk.

But all the other white kids at the school

Thought Allison was much worse than a fool.

They saw her as a traitor to her race.

They shunned her or they spat right in her face.

And so she had no friends in school at all,

No one that she could stroll with in the hall

Or sit beside in Social Studies class,

No one to whom discreetly she could pass

A little note that read: “Good God I’m Bored!”

Or: “Mr. Albrecht’s head looks like a gourd.”

And then one day in April Mrs. Plugg,

A P.E. teacher, lost her coffee mug.

Suspecting that a prank was being played

She wandered through the locker rooms and made

A strange discovery. She stood and viewed

While Dulcinea Pena squatted nude

Above the missing mug and filled it up

With urine and then handed forth the cup

To Allison who drank the liquid down,

At which point Mrs. Plugg’s bewildered frown

Became a look of horror and disgust.

She burst upon the scene and said, “You must

Desist at once this twisted and perverse

Activity of yours. I’ve seen no worse

Behavior in my 37 years

Of teaching. You’re both shameful little queers.

Miss Pena pull your pants up right this minute.

And if that mug has any liquid in it,

Miss Fyfe, you’re not to take another drink.

Go pour whatever’s left out in that sink.”

For several moments all three women stood

As still as figures chiseled out of wood.

Then Allison held up the empty cup.

“I’m sorry, but I drank the pee all up.

I know it’s wrong to take the cup from you,

But always we return it when we’re through.”

At that point Mrs. White turned ghostly pale

And looked as if her heart might start to fail.

“You mean to say you’ve done this thing before,

You filthy little lesbianic whore?

You drank your lover’s urine from my mug?

My god, that’s so repulsive that I’m…ugh…”

But suddenly she ended this rebuke.

She grabbed her stomach and began to puke.

A dozen half-digested chicken strips

From some fast-food joint burst forth from her lips.

They splattered on the floor around her feet

And smelled like tartar sauce and rancid meat.

When she had cleaned away this slimy mess,

She went to see the principal, Ms. Hess,

And told her all the things that she had seen,

Which caused Ms. Hess to turn a shade of green

And order a complete investigation

Into this appalling situation.

When Dulcinea gave Ms. Hess her side

Of the incident, she flatly lied

And said that Allison routinely paid

Minorities a handsome fee if they’d

Provide her with a cup of pee to drink.

“She’s got some sickness in the head, I think,”

Said Dulcinea to a horrified

Ms. Hess who sat and listened saucer-eyed.

Then from her purse the girl pulled a stack

Of dollar bills she’d earned from selling crack.

“This here’s a load of money that I’ve gotten

Just by stripping off my pants and squattin’

Above old Mrs. Plugg’s beloved cup

And pissing till I’ve filled the whole thing up,

Then handing it to Allison to drain

Into her mouth. I think I can explain

The reason she debases herself so.

You see, she’s very rich and, as you know,

The bulk of us at school here are poor,

So every time she steps inside the door

The sight of us just fills her with despair;

She sees again how terribly unfair

It is that just because we’re black or brown

Society conspires to keep us down,

While she, because she had the luck to be

The child of a wealthy family

With skin as white as freshly laundered sheets

Has never had to brave the angry streets

Where most of us spend nearly all our time

Plagued by hunger, poverty, and crime.

Her privileged life has filled her to the hilt

With quite an overwhelming sense of guilt,

And so she hopes by drinking poor folks’ pee

That she’ll atone, at least symbolically,

For living like a princess in a nation

Where legions are beset by deprivation.

I’m sorry that I took advantage of

This sickness of hers but, Ms. Hess, I’d love

To buy my mom a washer and a dryer.

We haven’t got those things, and that is why her

Saturdays are often wasted at

A dreary local coin-op Laundromat.

I’d hoped by selling Allison my pee

That I could set my tired mother free

Forever from the Laundromat routine.

Oh, please, Ms. Hess, I know it was obscene,

But what I did I did for love alone.

I don’t expect you ever to condone

My actions, but I’m begging you to try

And understand the reason behind my

Decision to sell Allison my piss.”

Ms. Hess sat quietly through all of this.

She listened carefully to every word,

Quite mesmerized by everything she heard,

And when the girl’s stream of lies ran dry,

Ms. Hess responded, “Dulcinea, I

Believe that you are blameless in this case,

So wipe away the teardrops from your face.
I give my solemn vow to you that I’ll

Not put a word about this in your file.

But Allison is quite another matter.

It sounds as if she’s madder than a hatter.

Her actions are disgusting and aberrant.

This really is a matter for a parent

To deal with, and not an educator.

I’ll call the Fyfes and break the bad news later.

Right now I need to marshal all the facts

About their daughter’s horrifying acts.

I need you to jot down for me a list

Of all the other girls who have pissed

For recompense from Allison so we

Can document this matter thoroughly.”

So Dulcinea listed several girls

(Juanita Munoz, Visitacion Uryls,

Conchita Cruz-O’Brien, Amy Turin)

Who’d dropped their pants and filled a cup with urine

Then threatened Allison with harm if she

Refused to drink down every drop of pee.

She handed in the list and turned to leave,

But at the door she stopped and seemed to grieve.

“I’m truly sorry for this thing I’ve done.

I hope you’ll get some help for Allison.”

She smiled sweetly, like a girl scout,

Then, silent as a cat fart, she slipped out.

Beyond the door she bolted for the hall,

Tracked down her four best friends and told them all:

“That skinny white bitch Fyfe has told Ms. Hess

About the piss we made her drink. Unless

We get our story straight and stick with it

The five of us will soon be deep in shit.

Now listen closely while I tell you what

I told Ms. Hess about that bony slut.”

And so they all repeated the same lie

And saved themselves from punishment thereby.

When Allison was told what they had said,

She merely sighed and shook her weary head.

Because she didn’t bother to refute

The charges made against her or dispute

Any of the “facts” Ms. Hess laid out,

Her guilt was deemed established beyond doubt.

In secret she was heartened by this strange

Development. She knew that it would change

Her parents’ outlook on her education

And cause them to improve the situation

By pulling her from this nightmarish school,

Where everyone was vicious mean and cruel.

And then she’d be enrolled in some elite

Academy where, hopefully, she’d meet

Students who were well-behaved and bright,

And teachers who were friendly and polite.

In fact, she had been willing to drink pee

For all those months for just one reason: she

Believed eventually that she’d get caught,

And both her parents would become distraught

And realize just what an awful choice

They’d made when they enrolled her at DuBois.

Of course she never guessed that she would be

Accused of paying money for the pee

But that development, though odd, did not

Diminish her relief at being caught.

And as she sat and listened to Ms. Hess,

She thought it might be best to just confess.

What harm is there in letting Ms. Hess think

I paid for all the piss they made me drink?

I’m not afraid to let her think I’m queer

So long as it will get me out of here,

For if I offer up a strong denial,

Ms. Hess just might convene a sort of trial

To see if what I say is true or not.

And if that happens my days will be fraught

With danger, because Dulcinea will

Encourage all her friends to treat me ill,

To physically and mentally abuse me.

I know I haven’t done what they accuse me

Of having done, but if it helps to speed my

Departure from this place then I’ll concede my

Guilt and hope Ms. Hess then feels compelled

To close the case and tell me I’m expelled.

And so she told Ms. Hess, “You’re right. I did it.

I paid them for their pee and I admit it.

I’ve got some sort of sickness in my brain.

It’s not a thing that’s easy to explain,

But when I see a girl with dark skin

I get this urge to drink her essence in.

Perhaps because my own skin is so pale

That kids say I’m a ghost and joke that they’ll

Go blind if I don’t cover up my face,

I’ve grown a bit self-conscious of my race.

I feel like I’m invisible sometimes

Or, like one of those irritating mimes,

Ghostly white and silent as the tomb,

I’m boxed inside a small and shrinking room.

Subconsciously, I guess, I thought I might

Become perhaps a darker shade of white

And be a bit more ethnic and more cool

And fit in with the other kids in school,

If I consumed some vital extract of

My colored classmates. I was like a dove

Who longed to be a streetwise pigeon who

Could coo just like the other pigeons coo

And walk just like the other pigeons walk

And fit in with the others in the flock.

A river pours its essence in the sea.

Perhaps, I thought, a colored girl’s pee,

Just like the Mississippi or the Nile

Contained its source’s essence and its…style.”
Even to Allison this sounded lame.

She lowered her head in dejection and shame.

Ms. Hess remained silent a little while,

And then she said with a rueful smile,

“In truth, my dear, I think it imprudent

For you to remain enrolled as a student.

You need more help than this place can provide.

And if you remain you’ll be vilified

By all the other students, which will make

Your daily life here very hard to take.

I urge you to get therapy, Miss Fife,

So that you can move forward with your life.

I plan to tell your parents they should think

Of having you examined by a shrink

Before they choose another school for you.

Beyond that, I don’t know what else to do.”

And that’s exactly what her parents did.

They sent her to be seen by Doctor Kidd,

A well-regarded therapist whose forte

Was giving psychological support

To teenagers bedeviled by some kind

Of sickness or derangement of the mind

(Perhaps you’ve seen her cable TV show:

Kidd On Kids: What Parents Need To Know

Or read a copy of her big bestseller,

How To Make an Angel of Your Heller).

Belinda Kidd spent hours talking to

Her client, Allison, before she drew

Conclusions, after which, the doctor had

A meeting with the client’s mom and dad.

She told them both, “I think its clear your daughter

Becomes aroused while watching girls make water,

And this desire only becomes sated

When she imbibes what they have urinated.

Although she says it isn’t true that she

Solicited from others cups of pee

But rather was the victim of some tough

Minorities who made her drink the stuff,

I believe her story is a lie.

Subconsciously she’s trying to deny

The fact that she’s a lesbian and so

She’s fantasized a whole scenario

Within her mind, in which she was the prey

Of predatory colored girls, and they

The villains of the piece, a motley clique

That made her days at school harsh and bleak.

If she were just a lesbian I’d say

To go ahead and send the girl away

To school at some small Academy

Where girls with the same proclivity

Might help initiate her into healthy

Sapphic sex, an enclave of the wealthy

Liberal establishment elite,

Whose students are well-bred and quite discreet,

Where Allison might learn about the ways

Of same-sex love from other teenage gays,

Girls with a background like her own

In whom refinement’s bred right in the bone:

Caucasian, upper-class, and Protestant.

Those students at DuBois – may I be blunt? –

Sound as if they’re mostly rather crude:

Indecorous, immodest, crass, and lewd.

And so I’d love to see her at a prep

School where she’d be much more in-step

With all the other students there enrolled.

But such a move I fear would be too bold.

Right now we really need to take a whack

At purging all her urophiliac

Proclivities, because I am quite sure

That not until we find a way to cure

Your daughter’s predilection to ingest

The liquid waste of others will the best

Academies and schools in the nation

Deign to even take her application.”

“And that is why,” said Allison to her

New best friend Miranda as they were

Perambulating outside in the yard and

Exploring all the pathways in the garden,

“I was sent away to this asylum.”

She stooped and took a close look at the xylem

Supporting an especially fine fern

(Botany was what she hoped to earn

A Ph.D. in someday). “This plant here

Is bracken and it’s poisonous to deer,”

She told Miranda in a quiet tone

As if she spoke to just herself alone,

“And it can even kill a cow or horse –

If they consume a lot of it, of course.

They eat it only when the grass is thin

Because of drought or winter setting in.

The fern’s deep roots allow the plant to thrive

When other plants can barely stay alive.

Reportedly, if you consumed enough

Of this plant’s leaves and other parts, the stuff

Could kill you in a short amount of time.

Quite frankly, when I think about it I’m

Surprised to find a toxic plant inside

A place where many residents have tried

To kill themselves. Oh, well, that’s not my prob.

I’ll leave the gardener to do his job.

This type of fern has always been to me

A model of the way I’d like to be:

It thrives in bad conditions for it shoots

Deep into the ground its lengthy roots.

It kills big ruminants and other beasts

And yet its fronds spread out nutritious feasts

For lesser creatures, moths and butterflies,

Whose larvae bracken tissue fortifies.

It makes the insect poisonous to eat

And gives its blood a taste that’s bittersweet,

Which keeps it safe from many things that might

Otherwise decide to take a bite.

That’s the bracken’s cure for social ills:

It feeds the meek. The ravenous it kills.

In certain myths it’s said that once a year

On John the Baptist Eve, there briefly appear

Flowers on ferns that bloom for one hour.

It isn’t true. A fern cannot flower.

But certain cultures still believe it grows

A blossom once a year. The legend goes:

Spot the flower of the fern and you’ll

Thrive in business, matrimony, school,

And every other undertaking that

You would like to be successful at.

And that is why each sixth day of July

I check each fern I see and hope to spy

A blossom that will bring good things to me.

It hasn’t happened yet, as you can see.

Oh well, I guess I’ve gotten way off track.

What was I speaking of awhile back?

Ah yes, about that stupid Dr. Kidd.

I told her all the things those girls did

Who shoved their pee at me and beat me up

If I refused to swallow down a cup.

But Dr. Kidd believed that I was lying.

Eventually I simply gave up trying,

And let her draw conclusions of her own

No matter how far-fetched or overblown.

And that is how I ended up in here.

The doctor says I need to stay a year

Or maybe two, until she is assured

My appetite for urine has been cured.

She sees me twice a week here, and no doubt

Has got her next bestseller all mapped out.

I shudder to think what its title will be:
Allison X: The Girl Who Drank Pee,

Or The Odd True Story of Allison X

And The Doctor Who Cured Her Piss Complex.

Or Urophilia: The Last Taboo –

The Shocking Story of a Girl Who

Ingested Other Children’s Liquid Waste.

Or Yellow River. Or A Real Bad Taste.

Or The Girl Who Mistook Piss For a Snack.

My god, she’s such an egomaniac.

They ought to lock her up in here for good.

I’d make her drink her own piss if I could,

Although she’d probably find the taste divine

And swear it was like amber-colored wine.”

And that is how Miranda came to learn

Of Allison’s life story. She in turn

Told Allison her own dramatic tale

Of how she nearly ended up in jail.

She told about Soon-Li and their great love.

She told the girl juicy stories of

The things they did behind closed doors at night,

The games they’d play, the poetry they’d write,

The way they combed the bookstalls searching for

Forgotten volumes of Romantic lore.

And soon the women were as thick as thieves.

From Allison Miranda learned of leaves,

And flowers, photosynthesis, how trees

Grow more than just one ring a year, how bees

Possess a sense of smell and thus are drawn

To aromatic flowers whereupon

They gather pollen which they later drop

On other blooms to fertilize the crop.

And that’s why flowers pollinated by

The bees smell sweet while those whose pollens fly

From plant to plant upon the hummingbird

Have no aroma (birds can’t smell). Each word

Of Allison’s botanical discourses

Miranda found delightful. Even gorses,

Which previously she’d encountered only

In John Clare’s poetry describing lonely

English heaths, in Allison’s descriptions

Came alive. And likewise her depictions

Of heather, cowslip, goldenrod and myrtle

Were just as vivid as those in the fertile

Nature poetry of William Wordsworth.

If it grew seeds and rooted in the earth

Then chances are that Allison could tell

You something of its genesis, its smell,

The way in which the plant is propagated

Or, if it is a weed, eradicated

(Though, truth be told, she dearly loved the weeds

And loved to scatter dandelion seeds).

For hours side-by-side the two would roam

The acres that surrounded the care home.

When Allison named some species of bird

Or plant, Miranda often, word for word,

Would quote some lines of Romance poetry

That she retained within her memory

In which the thing that Allison had named

Had once been celebrated by a famed

Poet like Lord Byron or John Clare –

Periwinkle, foxglove, maidenhair

(A type of moss), a butterfly (monarch)

Bluebell, heatherbell, hyacinth, skylark

(“The lark is so brimful of gladness and love…”)

The morning glory, the mourning dove,

Daffodil, forget-me-not (“love’s little gem”) –

Miranda had verses for all of them.

Allison one day shamefacedly

Confessed, “I’m not well-versed in poetry.”

She said to Miranda, “I beg your pardon

But I am afraid that The Secret Garden

By Frances Hodgson Burnett’s just about

The only great writing I can’t live without.

My grandfather gave me a copy for my

Eighth birthday, and since then I’d estimate I

Have read it from cover to cover at least

Three dozen times. The book is a feast

For lonely young girls who’d love nothing more

Than four high walls and a solid oak door

Enclosing a garden of earthly delight,

A place where one’s cares can be locked out of sight

And only a bosom buddy or two

Is allowed to enter and share it with you.

My grandfather saw that I loved it a lot.

The following year he went out and bought

An edition from 1983.

‘Each year on your birthday,’ he said to me,

Laying his big kind hand on my shoulder,

‘I’ll buy you a copy a decade older.

And then on the day that you turn sweet sixteen,

I’ll give you a first edition that’s clean

And fine. And if I can I’ll try to find

A copy that Mrs. Burnett once signed.

Does that sound good? Would you like that my dear?’

I gave him a great big hug, and a tear

Rolled down from his cheek and splashed on my face.

And every birthday my little bookcase

Grew one more Secret Garden wider. Then

Just months before my fifteenth birthday, when

My grandpa was out working in his yard

He tripped and fell and hit his head real hard

Against a wall of brick and passed away

Several minutes later where he lay.

My parents emptied out his house and found

A Secret Garden from the 1920s, bound

In leather and inscribed in fountain pen

By the author to: “Miss Alice N.

From her friend and next-door neighbor Frances

Hodgson Burnett.” I guess happenstances

Must have led my grandpa to this book

Whose inscribee’s name, though it doesn’t look,

Upon the page exactly like my own,

Is nonetheless for it a homophone.

That book’s the only thing in this entire

Nut house that I’d rescue if a fire

Broke out and in the early morning gloom

I was forced to rush out of my room.”

Miranda took the girl’s hand and said,

“Don’t be ashamed because you haven’t read

Much poetry or prose. I was your age

Before I ever read a single page

Of Romance literature, but now it’s my

Raison d’etre, and if you’d like it I

Can teach you all I know of poetry.

Just as you have educated me

About the ways of plants and bees and birds

I’ll educate you in the ways of words,

And how they dance, make love, or come to blows

Upon the page in rhymed and metered rows,

The way they sometimes float up from a book

By Tennyson or even Rupert Brooke,

The way that Kipling marches his to war,

The way that Milton’s seek out metaphor,

The grand palatial mansions in whose rooms

Browning’s duchesses confront their dooms,

The funhouse mirrors and the crooked floors

You’ll find inside of Lewis Carroll’s doors.

Allow me to explain these things to you,

To show you all the things a poem can do,

And you will be provided with a key

To secret gardens vaster than the sea.”

To Allison these words were like a balm:

They soothed her nerves and also helped to calm

Her fear that in her current situation

Her brain might lack sufficient stimulation.

She told the other, “Go ahead and start

The College of Miranda Everheart

And make me the first student ever to

Enroll and study poetry with you.”

And so upon their walks they’d bring along

El Cid or Beowulf, perhaps The Song

Of Roland or Orlando Furioso,

That grand chivalric work by Ariosto,

The works of Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, or Pope,

And then they’d settle on some grassy slope,

Get comfortable and open up some tomes

And read aloud a vast array of poems.

Soon Allison desired to compose

Verses of her own in metered rows

But wondered if the old forms were well-suited

For writing of the things that constituted

The story of her life – the piss and pain

She dealt with at DuBois, and this insane

Asylum to which Dr. Kidd had sent her.

She asked Miranda if she should present her

Story in a less well-ordered format.

“For years now I’ve been treated like a doormat

By parents, fellow students, teachers, shrinks,

And there’s a certain part of me that thinks

That I should throw tradition out the door,

Eschew this formalism and explore

Some radical new ways of writing verse.

Perhaps I ought to randomly disperse

My thoughts and feelings all across the page,

Write upside down or sideways, show my rage

By writing in a font that’s bold and black,

And then use nonsense words like glink and glack

And cortleshoe and dreebin and trebusion

To illustrate frustration and confusion.

I love the older forms and would prefer

To use them all the time, but I’m not sure

If I should bow to customs and traditions

When writing up my angry compositions.

When I am all alone in bed at night

I tell myself, and wonder if I’m right,

‘If Dante could use rhyme and meter to

Describe the wretchedness of Hell, then you

Can surely use it also to convey

Everything that life has thrown your way.’

But am I right, can formats used by Donne

Rossetti, Chaucer, Swift, and Tennyson

Have relevance today? Can they contain

Such rage, confusion, shame, despair, and pain

Within their stratagems and artifice

As I was made to feel by drinking piss?”

Miranda took her time in answering.

She lay awake that night just pondering

What Allison had asked her, then she took

A pen out and a leather-bound notebook

And, being in a rather philosophic

Mood, wrote down her thoughts upon the topic.

The next day as they sat upon the slope,

Miranda said to Allison, “I hope

This poem that I wrote last night gives you

Some food for thought and helps explain my view

That language is a living thing that’s got

A memory, and that good writers ought

To honor now and then that memory

By resurrecting forms from history

And using them to let their mother tongue

Relive a bit the days when she was young.

We humans if we’re taken by a whim

For youthful days can climb a jungle-gym,

Roll down a hill, throw snowballs at a tree.

These exercises are a remedy

For melancholy, stodginess, and such.

Why should our language not get back in touch,

From time to time, with youthful recreations

And take a break from modern irritations

By playing with a writer who is free

To let his mother taste again the glee

Of acting like a child for a while?”

And then she gave a nervous little smile

And read, although she was no great reciter,

Her If You Aspire To Be A Writer…

Then let the language do the things it wants,

Like dance a few old steps from time to time,

Wear vintage clothes, revisit bygone haunts

On metered feet laced up in shoes of rhyme,

And frolic with old forms that once were dear

Though time has long since torn the twain apart,

For then will language whisper in your ear

The ancient secrets of its telltale art.

Sure, take it places where it’s never gone

And put it through a metamorphosis,

But listen when it starts to ramble on

About the good old days. Remember this:

It’s not enough to love the language; you

Have got to make the language love you, too.”

When Allison had listened to this sonnet

She sat a while and meditated on it.

Then, after several minutes had gone by,

She turned and looked Miranda in the eye.

“I guess a formal poem’s somewhat like

A garden where, with hammer, twine, and spike,

We trace the flowerbeds in ordered rows

And then, with trowels, shovels, rakes, and hoes,

We dig and mound and fill or level out

The places where we want the blooms to sprout.

I love the flowers growing in the wild,

But ever since I was a little child

I’ve preferred the ones that are contained

In gardens that are beautifully maintained.

So if my poetry is to reflect

My inner self, then it should show respect

For boundaries, constraint, and limitation,

Order, elegance, and lineation.

Since I first started gardening I’ve shown

Great love for all the flowers that I’ve grown

By placing them in ordered rows; I guess

I shouldn’t show the language any less.”

And just like that young Allison became

Miranda’s fellow keeper of the flame

Of formal verse, of meter and of rhyme,

Of lyrics both delightful and sublime,

A follower of Dante and of Chaucer.

She rushed back to her room so she could toss her

Atrocious free-verse poetry away.

A little later on that very day,

Miranda gave to Allison a tour

Of Anne LeBeuf, and mentioned to her, “You’re

A newcomer and probably don’t know

The history of this asylum, so

Allow me to explain that Anne LeBeuf

Was married young. Her husband – cold, aloof –

Proposed to her when he discovered that

Her father was a wealthy plutocrat,

And Anne, an only child, was the heir

To the fortune of this millionaire.

Though Anne was sweet, her looks were very bland.

No suitors had come asking for her hand

Till Percival LeBeuf, a ne’er-do-well

Young fortune-hunter came and rang the bell

And asked if he might take her for a walk.

A few weeks later Percy had a talk

About Anne’s future with her father, Ed,

In which the men decided Anne should wed,

And Percy be her bridegroom, in the Spring.

They went to Anne and told her everything.

The news unsettled Anne who was a mere

Seventeen years old, a very queer

And quiet adolescent quite obsessed

With music, dance, and painting. She suppressed

Her interest in these things before her father,

For he considered Art a lot of bother.

For years she had been studying ballet

And thought she might be good enough someday

To land a spot in some small dancing troupe.

This marriage news quite threw her for a loop.

She told her father, ‘Sir, I love to dance,

And think I might, if given half a chance,

Become successful on the ballet stage.’

This put her forceful father in a rage.

‘The actress or the ballet prima donna

Is no better than a whore. You think I wanna

Sit there in my seat and watch my girl

Cavort and jump and lunge and glide and swirl

Adorned in nothing but her underwear

Upon a stage while strangers laugh and stare?

Erase that stupid notion from your head.

In three months’ time you’re going to be wed.

I’ll brook no backtalk. If you give me any,

I’ll toss you in the street without a penny.’

And so she married Percy late in May.

Her husband took a mistress right away,

And Anne was left alone at home, and blue.

She looked around for something she could do

To kill or (even better) fill her time.

She started to write children’s books in rhyme,

Fantastic tales filled with wolves and witches

And evil men who married girls for riches.

She built a whole mythology in verse

About a kingdom she called Adams Curse,

A place replete with goblins and with ghouls.

The men in Adams Curse were mostly fools

Or avaricious thieves, or libertines

Who kept the women down by sundry means.

The witches were the bane of Adams Curse.

They spent their days conspiring to reverse

The social order, which decreed that males

Were sons of God, and just as God prevails

Above, so should his sons down here below

Prevail over sheep and buffalo

And horse and cow and women, too, for they,

Were deemed to be mere creatures of the clay,

Daughters not of God, but of the earth

And meant to serve the loftier of birth.

And so the witches cast their secret spells

And formed a dark cabal called Jezebel’s

Society for Women’s Liberation

Which flourished underground throughout the nation.

When Anne LeBeuf’s quite old and sickly sire,

Eduardo “Stinky” Bottomley-Aguirre,

Expired in his sleep at 68,

He left the whole of his immense estate –

The bank accounts, the rental properties,

A yacht, a mansion, seven companies,

A patent for a type of soda water –

To Anne (now middle-aged), his only daughter.

When Percy learned that all this wealth belonged

To Anne alone, he felt that he’d been wronged.

He paid some crooked doctors to aver

In court that Anne was crazy and that her

Condition was so bad that she could not

Control her own affairs, and so she ought

To be pronounced insane by court decree.

Then Percy took the stand and said that he

Desired to be made – in re: his mate –

Custodian of her person and estate.

The judge at first was cool to this claim.

He found the doctors’ testimonies lame.

So Percy’s lawyer played his secret ace.

‘Your honor, when we searched my client’s place,

We found a manuscript in his wife’s hand

Which proves that she has lost her self-command.

Three-thousand pages filled with the most vile

And fervid fantasies. This wretched pile’ –

And here he pointed to the giant stack

Of papers on his right – ‘is an attack

Upon all people of the male gender.

The author’s very sick and you should send her

Immediately to a mental home.

Just take a peek inside this awful tome,

Where witches fly around and urge young wives

To chop off phalluses with butchers’ knives.

This book endorses forcible castration,

Sapphic love and female masturbation!’

He then recited several lines of verse

In which a group of witches place a curse

Upon a bunch of civic leaders who

Have formed a secret brotherhood to do

All sorts of things in private which polite

Society abominates, like smite

The buttocks of a naked prostitute

Hired from a house of ill-repute,

Inhale opium, look closely at

Daguerreotypes of naked children that

Were confiscated from the local mails,

Consume to excess various cocktails,

Cavort with teenage girls from out of town

Who ran away from home and now are down

And out, and for a stale crust of bread

Will give some fat and pasty burgher head

Or let him suck her toes or lick her bum

Or paint her waifish face with globs of cum.

To punish all these misbehaving cads

The witches cursed their penises with scads

Of lesions, boils, rashes, prickly heat

That oozed or burned or smelled like spoiled meat.

‘The New Bohemians of Adams Curse,’

That’s what this group of evil and perverse

‘upstanding citizens’ had named their clique.

They met in secret every other week.

And Percy’s lawyer knew for sure that Anne

Had based it on a local secret clan,

‘The Bacchanalians of [town unstated]’

In which the judge had been initiated

By his own father many years ago.

He often went there for fellatio,

A Turkish bath, a Panama cigar,

Or just to have a whiskey at the bar.

He rapped his gavel now in irritation

And stopped the lawyer in mid-recitation.

‘I’ve heard enough,’ he said, ‘And I decree:

Lock that bitch away and break the key!’

But Percy didn’t want his wife confined

Inside the local nuthouse, where her mind

Could be examined by impartial men

Of science who might let her out again

A week from now, a month, perhaps a year.

This possibility was his great fear.

And so he bought a hundred-acre plot

Way out in the wilderness and got

A world-famous architect to draft

The blueprint of a care-home for the daft –

A home for women only, because then

Some other rich and well-connected men

Might pay him to confine unruly wives

Who’d proved to be a burden on their lives.

The architect drew up some clever things:

A long main building off of which four wings

Extended reminiscent of the way

A ballerina’s echappé sautée

Appears when she is floating in midair,

A garden that resembled windblown hair

Extending from an oval entry hall

(This lobby’s shape was somewhat cranial),

A smaller garden – just a patch of green

And bushy shrubs – was planted right between

The ballerina’s legs outside the door

Connecting the asylum’s lower floor

To all the outdoor pathways, fields, and courts

Where both the inmates and the staff played sports

Or sought some other type of recreation

Or else just sat in quiet meditation.

And high atop the wide and shallow roof

Of this asylum named for Anne LaBeuf,

Exactly where a woman’s breasts would be

The architect arranged symmetrically

Two cupolas, quite mammary in form,

Solariums of glass, and always warm.

The builders had erected these with care

So that they jutted proudly in the air.

And thus poor Anne might well have felt that she

Was prisoned in her own anatomy.

She wandered through these halls for 40 years

And left behind a torrent of her tears.

Her husband had insisted that her tome

Be buried underneath the mental home.

He gave it to the builder Elmer Slade

And told him, ‘When the brick foundation’s laid

Make sure this book’s walled up inside that pit.

I never want to see this piece of shit

Again, so let this building be its tomb.

But Elmer left it in his living room

Where Lily Slade discovered it that night

And though she thought its contents were a fright,

She couldn’t bear to see the thing destroyed.

She snuck off to the stationer, Tom Boyd,

And purchased several pounds of very cheap

Writing paper. Elmer was asleep

When Mrs. Slade returned, and so she took

A fountain pen and copied from Anne’s book

A dozen or more pages in her best

Approximation of Anne’s hand. The rest

She scribbled on with wild subversive glee.

The next day Elmer grabbed the fake and he

Unwittingly abetted his wife’s plan

By passing on her copy to the man

Who oversaw the masonry and saying,

‘Make sure that when your men commence the laying

Of bricks this book is walled up in a pillar

And bury it beneath some type of filler

Like gravel so it cannot blow away

At five o’clock, when we call it a day.’

When Lily died in 1928

Her daughter put the novel in a crate

And shipped it to the owners of this place,

Who thought its contents truly a disgrace.

They stuck it in the basement where it sat

For years and years upon a shelf, and that

Is where I found it, buried under dust

And smelling like a century of must,

Five years ago when I went looking for

Some books (although I’m not one any more,

Back then I was a voluntary aide

To the chief librarian and made

A lot of trips downstairs where I would forage

Among the books we kept down there in storage).

At any rate, one day while down there lazing

Among the stacks I found something amazing,

A massive manuscript in rhyming verse,

LaBeuf’s The Chronicles of Adams Curse.

I took it to a friend of mine named Claire

Who works here as a nurse. She said, ‘Beware!

The managers of this asylum might

Be angry if that book is brought to light.

The story of this hospital’s inception

Has long been cloaked in silence and deception.

The giant global health-care corporation

That owns this place protects its reputation

Ferociously, and I suspect it won’t

Take kindly to that book. I urge you don’t

Attempt to publicize the tome you’ve found.

Keep it hidden down there underground,

Or hide it in your room beneath your bed.’

She looked at me and sadly shook her head.

‘The Mind-Care Corp. is run by men whose mission

Is generating wealth. Their sole ambition

Is just to stockpile lots and lots of riches.

A tale about phallus-chopping witches

Written by a woman who was wrongly

Committed here despite protesting strongly

For forty years that she was not insane

Is likely to upset those men. Refrain

From publicizing Anne LeBeuf’s sad plight

Until you are released or you’ll invite

Attention you don’t want from men who’ll aim

To make your fate and Anne LeBeuf’s the same.

And thus I keep it locked away down there

In the bowels of this leaping woman, where

I’ve access to it when I want to be

Immersed in Anne LeBeuf’s dark fantasy

About a land where men have all the power

And yet, occasionally, at witching hour,

A small but deadly sisterhood convenes

And with some hex or curse or other means

(A magic potion, say, or evil spell)

Gives the men a tiny taste of hell.

I’ll show it to you someday, if you want.

Be careful, though, it just may come to haunt

Your own dreams just as it now haunts my own

And chills me down to zero at the bone.”

Young Allison was fascinated by

Miranda and her stories. She said, “I…

I feel as if we’re both the offspring of

Poor Anne LeBeuf, bereft of warmth and love,

And locked away inside this crazy place,

The weeds and thistles of the human race,

Uprooted from the greater human lawn

And tossed into a trash heap, whereupon

We wither and grow brittler day by day

Until, I guess, like Anne, we fade away.

I wonder what she looked like – Anne, I mean.

Is there a picture of her? Have you seen

A portrait of her when she was a girl?

I don’t suppose a photograph of her’ll

Be found inside this building anywhere.

It’s probably a policy at Mind-Care

That crazy people shouldn’t ever see

Their predecessors in insanity.”

Miranda said, “I’ll show you, if you want

An image of her. Come, let’s take a jaunt

Along the pathway that goes up that hill.”

They climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed until

They stood upon the highest point around.

The air was very still. They heard no sound.

Miranda pointed down the hill to where

The care-home like a dancer in the air

Stretched out upon its grassy plot of land.

“My god,” said Allison, “it’s truly grand!

It looks just like a ballerina who

Has bid the earth a blissful brief adieu.”

Miranda smiled but didn’t quite concur.

It looked more like a cheerleader to her.

“That move is called an échappe sautée –

A French term and it means to leap away.

A literal translation, though, would be

A ‘leaping escape,’ an effort to break free.

Ironic, eh? For Anne LeBeuf was bound

Forever, like that building, to the ground.

She never could pull off her échappe,

And if she ever stood here to survey,

Like you and I, that building down below,

No doubt it was a sight that brought her woe.

My guess is that she saw, through tears of rage

A ballerina dead upon the stage.”

The women stood up there a long, long time.

And after that, most every day they’d climb

Up to the peak of “Mt. LeBeuf,” where they

Would talk or read or find some game to play.

Very soon the two of them were lovers.

Secretly they’d slip beneath the covers

Of each other’s beds when lights were out

To fondle, kiss, and probe, and poke about

Inside the other’s two wet pairs of lips

(The pair above, and down between the hips).

Miranda, down below her lover’s belly,

Would snuggle and recall some lines from Shelley:

A Sensitive-plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew,

And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light

And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

They’d fuck until exhausted. Then they’d part

And, with a wild trembling of heart,

The visitor would sneak out of the door

And tiptoe down the chilly, tiled floor

To slip back in her own room once again.

Because there was a general lack of men

Around the place, such Sapphic assignations

Were commonplace. But sexual relations

Between a woman who was 29

And a teenage girl, might incline

The staff to raise objections to these trysts

And earn them both a slap upon the wrists

Or some much harsher type of penalty.

And so their love was kept in secrecy.

They made out in the basement in between

The stacks of books, or underneath a green

And bushy canopy of leaves outside

Among the shrubs in which they loved to hide.

Miranda one day told her lover, “We

Should come up with a pair of names to be

Employed in secret only between us

When feeling playful, say, or amorous.

Though you have always called me Annabelle

My first love, Soon-Li Pai, quite early fell

Into the habit of employing my

Middle name whenever she and I

Were all alone. Perhaps I should use yours

When we are all alone like this outdoors

Or whispering beneath the sheets in bed.”

But Allison blushed and shook her head.

“My full name’s Allison Amber Fyfe,

But because of certain events in my life

I no longer care for my middle name.

To me it’s the color of anger and shame.

Let’s each give the other a name that refers

In some secret way to an aspect of hers.

For you I select the name Belladonna.

Out of all of the world’s flora and fauna

And everything else that lives under the sun

This lovely but lethal herb is the one

That most reminds me of you, for its name

Means ‘beautiful woman.’ And nobody’s claim

To beauty is quite as certain as yours.

The plant is a deadly poison, of course:

Its leaves, its seeds, its stems, and its roots

And even its beautiful purple fruits,

Can kill a man dead in a minute or two,

Which, more or less, is also true of you.

It’s said that belladonna speeds the beating

Of the heart, as you do when I’m eating

The fruit of your own lovely bush. What’s more,

According to legend, when witches soar

It’s belladonna that gives them the power.

They mix up the leaf and the fruit and the flower

Into a magical flying potion,

Then rub it all over themselves like lotion.

Beads of its nectar dropped in the eyes

Will nearly double the pupil’s size.

You’ve opened my eyes to so many things –

Like Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare’s Kings –

That Belladonna seems a perfect fit,

And so I hereby christen you with it.”

She picked up a stick that lay near a boulder

And tapped with upon Miranda’s shoulder.

“I love it,” Miranda said to her.

“And now on you I believe I’ll confer

The appellation Stella, which means ‘star.’

And certainly to me that’s what you are.

Its plural – stelle, or ‘stars’ – concludes each book

In Dante’s epic Comedia. Look!” –

And here she pointed upwards to the sky

To where a twinkling body way up high

Was visible beyond the tallest tree

Although it was just minutes after three

O’clock and still the day was very bright –

“One rarely sees a star except at night.

I guess that star came out just now to show

It likes the name I chose, and to bestow

Approval on the love that’s grown between us.”

Allison knew that the “star” was Venus

But she didn’t bother telling her lover

That it was no star that twinkled above her.

“You’re right,” she said, “I’m sure it is a sign

That like the Comedia, we’re divine.

Another sign is that your name for me

And part of mine for you rhyme perfectly,

And so I think for short I’ll call you Bella.”

Miranda smiled. And then she kissed her Stella.

Her If You Aspire To Be A Writer…

Had melted the writer’s blockage inside her,

And “Bella” was now creatively hot.

Every night in her journal she’d jot

A sonnet, an ode, a ballad or two.

But what she really most wanted to do

Was write up her autobiography

In the trappings of epic poetry.

She worked on the project a lot of the time

But just couldn’t manage to put it in rhyme.

So Allison told her “Forget about verse.

Poetry’s something you cannot coerce.

Just write it all down in the simplest prose.

And then when you’re done you can try to compose

A version in verse of the story you’ve told.

But spinning straw until it turns to gold

Cannot be done until you’ve got your straw.”

Miranda pondered this advice and saw

The sense in it. And so she simply spilled

Her words upon the page until she’d filled

Three notebooks with the story of her youth,

Concluding with the full unvarnished truth

Of how she killed off, metaphorically,

Harvey Prine and, less symbolically,

The actor who portrayed him for a fee.

She finished just as she was told that she

Had been declared by psychiatric pros

No longer subject any more to those

Irrational and uncontrollable

Moods to which she’d been susceptible.

The doctors gave the court sufficient proof

Miranda should be freed from Anne LeBeuf.

This news was greeted with a flood of tears.

By now she’d been there nearly seven years,

The last of which was happiest because

Of Allison’s arrival. So she was

Conflicted to be leaving for a while

The lover who had helped return the smile

She’d lost when Soon-Li Pai had lost her life.

She whispered to her lover, “Stella Fyfe,

I’ll love you till I die. And I will wait

However long it takes until that gate

Is opened for you so that you, like me,

Can walk away from here completely free.”

At that point Stella lifted up her head.

She smiled at Miranda then and said,

“They cannot hold me more than ten months more.

At seventeen, I’ll take my case before

A family court and get a declaration

Granting me complete emancipation

From Ann La Beuf and from my parents too.”

She paused and then she added, “I love you.

And when I make my échappe from here,

I’ll come to you, my lovely sonneteer,

And we will find a little house somewhere

That’s perfect for the two of us to share.

Then you’ll go back to selling poetry

For Mr. Gundt. I’ll find a nursery

That needs a girl who can tend to plants.

And like a pair of spinsterly old aunts,

We’ll spend our days with books and vegetation.

Our nights we’ll spend in Sapphic copulation.”

They laughed and kissed and held each other tight.

Their eyes were full of love, their smiles bright.

“C’mon,” Miranda said, “there’s one more chore.”

She led her lover to the basement door.

They went downstairs and secretly they took

Away from there poor Anne LaBeuf’s large book.

They packed it in a duffel bag with clothes

(A sweater, jeans, some shoes and pantyhose),

And when Miranda finally left the home,

She carried with her Anne LeBeuf’s odd poem.

CANTO IV

When she was free Miranda spent her time

Converting all her notes about her crime,

Her youth, her love for Soon-Li Pai, the way

She woke up on that horrifying day

To learn Soon-Li was dead, the awful pain

That followed this event, and how her brain

Descended into darkness for awhile,

Making it impossible to smile

Or function like a normal girl, into

A memoir which read somewhat like a True

Confession in a tawdry magazine:

My Soulmate Died When I Was Just Fifteen!

Or: Sapphic Killer Finally Has Her Say!

Or: How I went from Poetry to Gun Play

Because My One True Lover Lost Her Life

To a Crazed Assassin’s Bloody Knife!

She knew her memoir was no masterpiece,

But writing it allowed her to release

A lot of pent-up hatred from her past

And bid some demons au revoir at last.

She longed to make her story a novella-

In-verse like Childe Harold so that Stella

Might come to see that narrative-in-rhyme-

And-metered-feet can be both quite sublime

And also very helpful if you’ve got

A mental demon needing to be fought,

Some tragic incident from which you’d love

To spin creative gold so as to shove

Aside the pain and put into its place

A poem, thereby turning your disgrace

To triumph in a small but lovely way.

Her memoir was not gold but coarsest clay.

Its prose was purple and its structure shoddy,

The love scenes were less beautiful than bawdy,

And dirty language marred most every page.

But in this un-Romantic day and age,

Miranda understood instinctively,

It’s crassness that commands the highest fee,

And her desire now was just to make

A fortune from this book and then to take

The money and invest it in a way

That guaranteed there’d never come a day

When she or Allison would have to work

Inside a bookstore as a menial clerk

Or at Home Depot selling flower pots.

Miranda figured there were probably lots

Of publishers who’d eagerly shell out

A fortune for a true-crime book about

Teenage lesbians and serial killers,

With blood enough for several full-length thrillers,

An act of vengeance bloody and insane,

In short a mix of sex and blood and pain,

And just the kind of thing – offensive, crass –

That most appeals to the unlettered mass

Of people who buy “literature” these days,

Pilistines whose smug and cloddish ways

Have filled the world with ignorance and greed.

Well, fuck ‘em – if that’s what they want to read,

Miranda thought, I’ll give it to ‘em then.

I’ll make a high-class hooker of my pen.

And when I’m rich, they all can go to hell.

I’ll buy a place where Allison can dwell

With me forever, perfectly at peace.

Perhaps, like Byron, we’ll go live in Greece

Or Rome like Keats, or like the Brownings go

To Florence, or else frolic in the snow

Of Switzerland like Shelley and his crew,

Someplace where we can read and write and do

Whatever we desire, with no cares,

Two young and cute and gifted millionaires.

It turned out that Miranda was correct.

Her book had an astonishing effect

Upon the culture and the Zeitgeist, too.

She got a Sunday New York Times Review

(“An absolutely wretched piece of trash

That I predict will surely be a smash

Success with teenage Goths and horror fans,

But surely will appall most lesbians,

And feminists and Asians and the chaste,

Or anyone possessing decent taste.”),

She got 60-Minutesed and Morning Editioned,

And Amazon sales rank top-positioned,

She was BOMC Main-Selectioned

And “You should have died by lethal injectioned,”

She was “Bitched!” and “Dyked!” and “Prostituted!”

And “You’re the type they should electrocuted!”

She was “Jesus’ll burn you like a popcorn kernaled”

She was Washington Posted and Wall Street Journaled

She was autograph-hounded, Paparazzied,

And “Yer probably a feminazied!”

She was pulpit-denounced and pundit-battered,

Tabloid front-page headline splattered,

She was “Your book’s really truly sleazied”

And “We’ve sold the film rights to Martin Scorsesed!”

Royalties, foreign sales, paperback rights –

Very soon her fortune grew to dizzying heights.

Because of her beauty and her lethal wit

And because she possessed the requisite

Name recognition and celebrity,

And more than enough personality,

Hollywood beckoned and New York did too,

Where the ad men on Madison Avenue

Requested that she help them sell such stuff

As Femme Fatale perfume and Let’s Get Rough,

A lingerie line with an S&M twist,

(“Temptation is the only thing I can’t resist!”)

A luxury car and a handbag line

(“I keep a loaded Derringer in mine.

What do you keep in your Dooney & Bourke?”).

Miranda rejected this degrading work.

She bought a house with a great big yard, in

Which she constructed a secret garden.

Four brick walls and a heavy wooden door

Were all that she asked the construction crew for.

Beyond the door she planted lots of roses

And built a small shed for rakes and hoses

And other implements of the gardening trade.

With her own two hands and some tools she made

Some wooden planter boxes in which she

Bestrew the seeds of monkshood and sweat pea.

Because she didn’t know an awful lot

Of garden lore she mostly left the plot

An empty canvas Allison could fill

With honeysuckle, bluebell, daffodil,

Or shrubbery of every size and sort,

When she received permission from the court

To live as an emancipated minor,

At which time no asylum could confine her,

Or even Mr. Fyfe and Mrs. Fyfe

Control the way she chose to live her life.

The hearing was about a month away.

Miranda now looked forward to that day

With such excitement, giddiness and joy

You’d think she was an awkward schoolboy

Preparing to go out on his first date,

Too nervous to sit down, relax, and wait.

She puttered anxiously around the house.

She fiddled with the buttons on her blouse.

She paced the floor to keep from climbing the walls,

She scrubbed the countertops and swept the halls.

A week before young Allison’s release

Miranda thought she’d go and make her peace

With one more haunting revenant from her past:

The first, the best, but not, alas, the last

Great love that she had known, Miss Soon-Li Pai.

Miranda thought she ought to say good-bye

And ask Soon-Li’s permission now to part

And take another lover to her heart.

She longed to go and shed some final tears

Upon the grave of one she’d loved for years.

She wanted to enjoy a few last hours

Visiting Our Lady of the Flowers,

The cemetery where Soon-Li was laid

Into the earth beside a peaceful glade,

To find her grave and lie down right beside it,

Bring Shelley’s Adonais and recite it:

But now, they youngest, dearet one, has perished

Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished.

She knew this trip would have to be her last

Into the regions of her haunted past.

Afterwards she needed to let go

Of all her anguish, bitterness, and woe,

Move forward with her life and start afresh,

Live not with ghosts but only with the flesh-

And-blood of living people. That is who

We ought to give our love and kindness too.

The dead have given all they have to give

And ask us in return, just one thing: Live.

Live and take our memories into

The bright and frightful future of which you

Are destined yet to be a living part.

Take us there and keep us in your heart

And maybe when your dust has joined the earth

Some other soul will make for you a berth

Within her heart where, like a simple song

Whose author’s dead, you’ll still in part belong

Among the living though your breath is stilled,

Your eyes are shut, your destiny fulfilled.

And so Miranda visited the ground

Beneath which her dead lover could be found

Asleep as in an elegy by Gray.

She opted not to bring some simple lay

Or sampling of elegiac verse

But Anne LeBeuf’s account of Adams Curse.

She thought Soon-Li might find the book a treat.

Its elegantly rhymed and metered feet

Contrasted so completely with the bold

And bloody tale of butchery it told

That it was quite a paradox of sorts,

A lovely woman spewing foul retorts

Into the faces of her false accusers:

You pedophiles, masturbators, boozers,

And tiny-penised parasites aren’t fit

To smell my cunt or even eat my shit!

She knew Soon-Li would surely get a rise

From hearing Anne LeBeuf philosophize

In strains both eloquent and full of hate

About how Man wreaks havoc on his mate.

And so she settled down upon the grass

And from her backpack lifted out the mass

Of papers that comprised this weighty tome.

She knew of course that Anne’s great epic poem

Was way too long to be recited whole.

She thought she might just let her fingers stroll

Among the pages, stopping here and there

To give Soon-Li a sampling of the fare.

But just as she was starting to intone

It dawned on her that she was not alone.

A movement just beside her caught her eye.

She turned and heard a young man tell her, “Hi.

You’re Annabelle Everheart, are you not?”

She nodded impatiently. He said, “I’ve got

A copy of your book here. Will you sign it?”

There was something (she could not define it)

Familiar about this strapping guy

That scared her though she couldn’t have said why.

“So…what’s your name?” Miranda said to him.

He smiled as he told her it was Tim.

She took the book he offered her and then

She scribbled something in it with a pen:

Dear Tim

This is no Elegy by Gray

But in its own quite ordinary way

(Which many critics found downright uncouth)

It tries to tell the story of a youth,

Like Gray’s, who lost her life when she was still

Quite young and now lies buried on a hill.

Large was her bounty, and her soul sincere.

I wish I were with her. Or that she was here.

She signed her name and handed Tim the book.

But something in his eyes – a haunted look –

Reminded her of staring in a mirror.

Then suddenly her memory grew clearer.

The smile that he flashed her made her nervous.

“Timothy James Cole, Ma’am, at your service.

I’m told I look a lot like my big brother.

We were very close to one another.

And when you shot him dead you shot me too.

But I survived. That’s rotten luck for you.

For I have come to even up the score.”

Then from his bag he pulled a .44.

“Prepare yourself. Your time has come to die.”

And then he put a bullet in her eye.

It blasted out the back side of her head

And painted Adams Curse a bloody red.

Tim put away his gun and turned around

And stealthily he left this hallowed ground.

A sudden blast of wind came rushing through

The cemetery and it blew and blew

Until the manuscript of Anne LeBeuf

Went airborne with a quick resounding poof!

Two-thousand seven-hundred and eleven

Pages floating off like souls to heaven.

Away they drifted on the sudden breeze.

Some landed in the pond and some in trees.

The bloody ones were heavy and they fell

Like souls cast out of heaven into hell

(Hurled headlong flaming from the sky,

As Milton might have said, had he been nigh.)

Miranda, though, was not aware of this.

There settled on her such a sense of bliss

That everything seemed perfectly serene.

Her sight grew sharp, her hearing extra keen

And through interstices of this our world

She looked on as another one unfurled,

A brighter world and less conventional

Than ours is, much more dimensional,

Where daisies are rose-scented, and the rose

Emits a perfume nothing earthbound knows,

A place where light and color can be felt,

Where warmth is heard and music can be smelt.

Then suddenly a cloudy haze arose

And distant voices talking caught her nose

And ears and eyes and fingertips and tongue.

They sounded animated, fervid, young.

She raised her head and through the dewy blur

Saw seven figures hailing to her.

Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, John Clare,

Blake, and Burns. They all wore longish hair

And leather jackets in the biker fashion

Upon which had been stitched The Bards of Passion,

And on the other side, above the heart,

A nickname each had taken from his art:

Skylark, Tyger, Bright Star, The Corsair,

Phantom, Rantin’ Dog, and Nutter (Clare).

Gone were clubfoot, bald patch, paunch, and stoop.

This gang was quite a hale and hearty troop.

They strode up to Miranda in a swarm,

Their friendly faces smiling wide and warm.

Said Burns, “But ye’r an unco bonny lass.”

Lord Byron placed a hand upon her ass,

And in his eye there burnt a wicked gleam.

“The hungry worm devours the apple’s dream,”

Said Blake and winked as if it were a joke.

Then Wordsworth gave his ribs a gentle poke.

“She’s only just arrived. Desist at once.”

He told Miranda, “Just ignore this dunce.”

“My word, you are an intellectual beauty,”

Cooed Shelley, who himself was quite a cutie.

The man upon whose chest Bright Star was sewed,

Said, “Yes, and I shall write for her an ode.”

Another bid her, “Welcome home, my lamb.”

She asked, “Are you John Clare?” He said, “I am.”

Said Byron, who was quite her favorite poet:

“You’re one of us now, girl, and to show it

We’ve fixed you up a jacket you can wear.”

And suddenly there floated in the air

Before Miranda’s eyes a leather coat.

She noted as the sobs welled in her throat,

The oval patch of leather whereupon a

Gothic stitching spelled out Belladonna.

Then all those wild laughing long-haired boys

Said “Put it on!” and made a cheering noise.

She donned the coat and zipped it to her chin.

The sight of her made all the poets grin.

“Ye’ve joined the gang now, lassie. Ye’r a Bard,”

Said Robert Burns, and then he squeezed her hard.

Said Blake, who was the oldest of the crowd.

(His voice was boisterous but not too loud):

“You’ve been asleep but now you’ve woken up.

You were the tea, but now you are the cup.”

Wordsworth rolled his eyes and said, “Oh please!”

But Blake continued with his courtesies.

“If life is but the dream before the dawn,

Now comes a life whose dream goes on and on.

You’ll ride with us when we go out at night

And visit those attempting to indite

The brand of poems we once did compose

Or any kind of poetry or prose

Which demonstrates that language is an art

And tells the truth about the human heart.

We’ll seek the lonely writers and the shunned

And shun the arrogant and orotund.

The quiet girl no one likes at school,

The dogged dreamer they all call a fool –

We’ll visit them and whisper in their ears

And substitute a lyric for their tears,

And with our lightness dare defy the dark

By kindling the odd creative spark,

For now you are a spirit and a muse.

Come ride with us and help us to diffuse

The gift of words to all of those who strive

To keep our ancient ministry alive.”

Miranda said that it would be an honor.

They made her raise her hand and swear upon her

Own yet undug grave that she’d endeavor

To serve the cause of literature forever.

The moment that she told the Bards, “I will,”

There fell upon the scene a sudden chill.

Then lightning flashed, the dewy clouds all parted,

A rumbling thunder rolled (perhaps God farted),

Trumpets blared, an angel choir descended,

And up ahead Miranda apprehended

Through the disappearing veil of mist

The finest sight that ever could exist

And one she feared she nevermore would see,

Her soulmate, lover, Albion’s daughter – Soon-Li!

She left the Bards and rushed up to engirth

The greatest friend she’d ever had on earth.

They laughed, they kissed, they giggled, and they cried,

They took each other’s hands and softly sighed.

They hugged each other many times and hard.

At last Miranda asked, “So you’re a Bard?”

For Soon-Li had a jacket like the rest.

She pointed to a patch upon the chest

Where Motordyke was spelled in golden thread.

The Bards appeared and Percy Shelley said,

“Pray, turn around and show the other side.”

Soon-Li obliged him, smiling with pride.

Miranda read upon the jacket’s back

In golden letters Leader of the Pack.

“That’s right,” said Blake, “your dear friend Soon-Li Pai

Now rules the riders of the nighttime sky.

She tells us where to spread the inspiration

And where to strike out fear and trepidation.

She works us hard but with an even hand,

And all of us obey her least command.”

“Correct,” Soon-Li replied, “but now you’ve two

Commanders – for, Miranda, I’d like you

To join me as a leader of this odd

But terribly Romantic little squad.

Together we will seek the solitary

Poets, and into their lairs we’ll carry

Inspiration bound to foster loads

Of sonnets, ballads, triolets, and odes.”

Miranda gave consent to this request.

Soon-Li zipped down her coat, and on her chest

There lay a silver chain that looped her neck.

It held a tiny key. “And now our trek

Into the realms of literary art

As co-commanders is about to start,”

Soon-Li intoned. She then removed the chain.

Which sparkled like a thousand drops of rain.

She took the key that dangled at its end

And unlocked Heaven’s gate for her old friend.

Across the threshold arm-in-arm they stepped,

As seven true Romantics watched and wept.

And now, great muse and best friend of my youth,

I’ve written all I know of Love and Truth,

And so, as angels sing an a cappella

Welcome to you, I must go…

Your Stella