=Virginia Werewoolf=

She's pretty unhappy. All she ever wanted was to eat the whole world. The sun flipped over like 

a fried egg sizzling on bright blue Teflon. She climbs 

into the attic and finds herself

 in the middle of a fancy dinner party. 

A maid offers her a canapé. 

A tiny man hopelessly stuck to the cracker

 with some kind of colorless pate.  

She puts the plate down on a nearby

 table and hurries away 

from the smell of her own nervous fart 

hovering in the corner like a ghost. 

What I need, she thinks, 

is a machine-gun of my own.  

Loaded with silver bullets. 

The medium in the lavender turban

 faints dead away, then revives,

 speaking in tongues. 

Meanwhile, she escapes through the lace curtains

 blowing into the room. Outside in the sea air. 

She takes the rocks out of her pocket, 

one by one, examines them with great curiosity,

 as if she's never seen them before. 

She sets them carefully on the balustrade of the porch

 like her own version of Stonehenge. 

At the back of the yard, 

burning giraffes gallop over the abandoned croquet court. 

She pours water into the dried-up flower boxes. The kids throw rocks over the garden wall. 

Call her a witch. 

One of these days we'll see about that. 

The cats taking refuge on the porch, 

stretch out like paper snakes. 

The one-eyed tabby is her favorite. 

Face like a mad poet in a tam. 

Back inside, it's always tea-time. 

Everything soaked in gasoline.  

Her husband a photograph in a frame. Nothing behind it. 

Nothing behind anything. 

Her friends, like a circling of the wagons, 

picked off one by one. 

Among the rocks, 

the critics, hidden like Indians.

The waves crashing on the shores of her sanity. 

Full moon. 

She's running barefoot in the wet grass, 

mouth full of the taste of blood, 

hands that could crush stones to mineral powder. 

The lighthouse, where is it, 

in all this drifting fog? 

She pinches the dead heads off the marigolds. 

Acrid perfume. 

Scent behind her ears, on her wrists. 

Halo of bees. Shock treatment. 

Is this the lighthouse? 

If so, shouldn't she turn on the light? 

Is this the Last Stand? 

Buzzing in her ears. 

They'll never take her from this house except feet-first. 

No children. 

No meals-on-wheels. 

No first alert pendant to summon an ambulance 

when she falls and can't get up. 

Dying there on the floor surrounded by cold-eyed cats. 

Who’s afraid of me? 

She laughs and laughs. 

When the mail comes it's flyers, bills, 

appeals to her charity. 

How many birds has she eaten in her lifetime? 

Shakespeare's hairy little sister 

escaped from the attic. 

Jesus saves. 

Thank you very much but I'm not drowning. 

Take off your straitjacket and stay awhile. 

I'm not burning in invisible flames 

not squirming at anyone's stake. 

What I'm doing 

is laughing my ass off.
What I'm doing is working my way free of a soul.