Month of Poetry: 5 January

Every year, I participate in a month of poetry challenge where the goal is (you guessed it) to write one poem every day. A solid 70% of them are not worth reposting, but occasionally there is one that I don't mind airing a little further.

The origins of this poem are a bit of a twisty story, but all the inspiration is from art, not my own life (art has proved a richer vein, given how peaceful and uneventful my life has been, excepting the death of my dog, for the last little while). 

I am currently doing a re-read project with my Agatha Christie collection, and just finished reading the Poirot novel Five Little Pigs, which I have always thought is a top-tier Christie. While reading it, I was listening to Taylor Swift's Folklore album (I am not a Swiftie, but that specific album I do really like and have listened to many times over the years). Just as I reached the denouement of the novel, the album hit the song Mad Woman, and the two things fused irrevocably in my head ... and the next poem I read, serendipitously, was Sylvia Plath's Mad Girl's Love Song. Then my friend wanted to have a conversation about Medea, which she had just seen a screen version of, and the theme for the day was inescapably obvious.

So this poem is my version of a woman who fights back against men who try to destroy her, and in doing so, does extreme, even inexcusable, things, and gets represented as mad. And maybe she is ... but whose fault is that?

Flame

they say: be the bigger person
it only hurts you more, to hold it
to nurse it like a baby kitten in your cold shaking hands
stroking and stroking til the fur is slick with your sweat
and your tears

after all, men are like that
what can you even do? you can't do anything
it will just hurt you more

men are that way, and women
well, women have to accept it
the midnight agonies and the breakfast pantomimes
the cruelties and the indifference
the shame of it

women's power is muted, hidden, and it is born in pain
you cannot do anything except be the bigger person
forgive if you can, forget if you can't
draw a veil down over the past, brick up your rage

and you say: oh yes, I will be the bigger person
I will be the bigger monster
and my canine teeth are sharpened to needle points
oh yes
there will be blood tonight

but what can you even do, though
you look like a crazed woman
and you know what happens to women when they let go of their minds
of their soft edges and their gift for smoothing out the path
of the way they smile and smile and swallow it all down
all of it
all the hurts and all the betrayals
all the bitterness held up to their mouths
all the thorns in their hearts

what can you do, they say, and I say:

here is a match