In three instances, a quarrel. They just happened.
You can imagine, living with an audience for
several years, one might crave affection from the graveyard.
Adorned with diamond rattler’s around her neck,
she hissed! A victim losing her fingernails, clawing concrete,
speaking at a bouquet of guns against her head.
She hissed and spit whore
venom on the Church, on God’s appointments
on the blood of her own Mother.
There was plenty of talk in her head,
like she hadn’t been cooked all the way.
Little Birdie,
we called her.
It.
Whoever she was!
And this, the first quarrel!
The most vicious influence was the lonely lie.
Her handsome face, her warm fingerprints
marking the dry surface of men, her pretty
negligent smile. A suspicious flattery.
We hate that word ‘lonely’. It sounds too much like
her long, cimmerian hair falling out of
nonsense, into the hands of Marcus,
who was legal and wise.
She was sick with her voices,
but her art flowed with age, though an age she would
never meet. She was never a companion,
never a graceful daisy soaking in a glass on the windowsill.
She was sour. The yellow tart.
She was built by a man of taste,
not by a woman of fertile soil and thick roots.
She was the feel of scandal for fifteen years,
a southern discovery of poor breeding;
thus, of the quarrel! The second!
Until we found her. Marked on
a cotton morning, her delicate apology.
Her body rot little overnight, her palm held smudges of
the colour of kisses she blew everywhere.
The undeserving. The unpolished drunkards
sleeping in her
empty stairwell.
Most people like that war.
The soldier falling on
desperate knees, giving her awful consent,
her soiled white handkerchief surrendering from
the cup of her bra.
This is the third quarrel. The one they want to hear.
Was there a symphony of blood?
Was she wrapped in her velvet curtain and dropped
from the top floor?
Who played the piano? Who picked up her body
and decided that she wrote this score?
Even the tears cried for her gossiped about this act.
This was the starving quarrel.
Fed like a good husband, yet hollowing still!
Maybe she was a little wild
and sick with threats,
poor Little Birdie, her nervous
beauty gulped her down like a glass of Brandy.
She was tired.
And this, the third quarrel. Act Three.
Curtains down.
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