Muse

Dear ferocious, unforgiving, femme fatale with the filigree earrings,

I had an idea to write my first poem tonight. I’ve never written even a single line before. Yesterday I broke up with my girlfriend Michelle. We always argued and have broken up many times before but I know it is over now. She always wore opportunity shop clothes, that no matter how ragged they were, looked sexy on her. She was a kleptomaniac and every moment I had to be her lookout as she stole groceries, televisions, ornamental vases. She was the only woman who could satisfy me when giving oral sex and she loved swallowing my semen but it’s all over now. Tonight I felt like an emotional volcano and started writing a poem. I wrote how her smile was like the sun. How her tears were made of moonbeams. How her hair cascaded down like a waterfall. I had almost finished the poem when a vision of her appeared in the candle light. She seemed to be real to me. She looked at me with contempt and took my poem and ripped it up. She told me to stop writing this sentimental crap. She told me to write from my soul not with the syrupy juices of my hallmark card heart. She slapped me on the face and told me to shape up and then she was gone. I then wrote a poem about how I once saw her hanging all her newly dyed black clothes on the line and how they looked like bats hanging from a tree. I wrote how my lust for her was an untamed thing and I must never forget that although she is my muse, she is not some mythological Goddess but a woman made of flesh and blood living forever in my memory.

From the dazed
and confused man
standing on the deck
of the Manly Ferry.