Dead Muse
By FlatDaddy
My baby’s all black and blue and broken,
lying on the bed beneath me
inside me,
Done in by ice
and eight years of morphine
that never ends the pain —
but dulls the mind
slays the will
and killed my baby dead.
Mad pain’s my one steady date,
all dolled up in dopiness,
dizzied dreams of what was,
what is,
what will never be
and will never end.
Screaming in the night
she awakes sometimes
to whisper in my ear:
Sweet Nothings.
Sometimes she grins a little wicked smile
then bleeds me back to druggy peace
where I never dream of her now
never see more than her back
that fine ass
that’s bottomed out,
bequeathed to another by now, I’m sure,
but still dead beneath me
inside me
pleading softly for me to call her
“Franky.”
So now, at last,
bending to her perverse will,
I think a quiet, desperate “okay.”
I hook her up,
a web of wires that link her
to the fire in other’s dreams,
a frantic search for someone’s spark
to siphon off
and pump her full
and blow those baby blues wide open.
And now,
dead eight years,
I think
perhaps
just maybe …
I think I see
a smile.
I feel the muse here is the dead one for eight years now.
Painful loss…she is no longer inside him. Either she forced him into the drugs or he forced her out because of them.
I think your poetry screams about the underside of life…the side many may not want to see because it mirrors them.
The unwanted sides.
This is really good, FD.
j.
Thank you so much, J. All true, of course; however, in poetry, all readers can see only what they can interpret from their particular viewpoints, their own life experiences, and thus, their “interpretation” is valid only as possible truth, their truth — but actual truth can be diametrically opposite: The muse is the hero: eight years gone, killed by pain, and now, with the HELP of the morphine, is finally the resurrector. Then, of course, the morphine itself must be, and was, vanquished, and the man is back. For now, at least. In a situation like this, nothing is permanent. Try it from that viewpoint.
I already replied, but I keep getting a notification that takes me back to here. So I don’t know if you got what I replied last night, above this.
I sure did get it….the poem is universal when readers might get something different from the poem than what exactly inspired it.
j.
I figured the notification number would change once the reply had been read and answered. Guess not. That’s confusing.