Femme Fatale Poet

“The roof of a coffin

Detached in the violence”

—Ted Hughes

“The Table”

Birthday Letters

____________________

It was your gift to me—

A solid writing table for poetry

Something that would last a lifetime—

A solid Elm plank two inches thick

Wild bark still snarling around edges—

Rough-cut coffin timber for a corpse

Sitting here tonight writing—

It’s a door opening into my grave

It’s a raft for a long-term voyage—

Over the drowned sailors of the dead

Smelling the North Tawton evening—

Calmly sipping another martini

I drink too much but it’s the only thing—

That keeps these words flowing

I sleep all day trying to forget—

Then I resurrect my Daddies at night

The cuckoo clock no longer ticks—

I killed the fuckin bird a long time ago

I sleepwalk through the house at night—

Blindfolded inside a looking glass

Court Green my stage without props—

A paltry script torn out of time

The peanut-crunchers lean in & stare—

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

After Ariel I started writing noir verse—

Big Sleep Raymond Chandler-esque

The Long Goodbye just kept going on—

I ended up the usual femme fatale

My desk is the roof of my coffin now—

I’m the Lady in the Lake under the dock

I washed up on this side of the Atlantic—

Just another Fulbright frightened girl

I ended up a has-been aging widow—

At least that’s what everybody thinks

Abandoned by my runaway husband—

Ditched by a no-good deadbeat daddy

The Queen makes me Poet Laureate—

Even bestows the Order of Merit to me

Secretly she knows the awful truth—

Murder, My Sweet our womanly secret