I would stare into the mirror
And feel revolted
As I saw you there with me.
I thought that I’d exorcised you
Taken what you put into my body
And catapulted it into a black hole
That doesn’t belong to me.
But there you were –
In my disappointment, my outrage, my loneliness,
My madness and my violence.
In my womanly features, a man,
The partial creator of me.
I won’t embody a tree with rotten fruits.
You engulfed me in your mindset like an Iron Maiden
And I couldn’t drag you out of my skin,
Distilling the poison, detoxicate it,
Trusting that I would finally emerge
And that you wouldn’t have to let me.
You’d never reveal the truth of you,
One story buries another,
One fate worse than the other,
All hands drowning each other
And you sit back while birth happens
Thinking that it will guarantee your survival.
You looked over my face and put yours on it
Everything that needs to disappear into a pocket.
I’m trying to see what I see and what is there
Not what you repress and reject.
That’s what I read in your eyes when you held me,
Looked at me. The obnoxious truth, the saviour, a glass too full.
And you’d call me a monster and yet drink it all,
Over and over again, the master of emptiness.
“Maiden of the harvest” by Jean-François Portaels (1818-1895)
Croque-Melpomene 