A Morbid Poem

In the fall of 2005, a friend asked if I would contribute a story or poem to a horror anthology she was editing; its theme was the reanimation of the dead. After some bemused consideration at the gardens, I dashed this poem off on a yellow legal pad. I tinkered with a line here and there, but this is still substantially what I wrote on the first go. It's a dramatic monologue, but I'll not explain too much: half the fun of dramatic monologues is constructing characters and situations from the clues in the text. Rereading it over a year and a half later, I think it feels clunky and a bit overwrought, probably due to my current haiku kick. Still, there are a few turns of phrase that please me, and the concept itself is, I think, pretty darn cool.

CHRYSALIS

I am dead, wrapped in plastic…

When again I found myself, after long knowing nothing—
Blind, deaf, mute, insensate—
I knew only that I was, again.
And I knew that you were, that you are.
Even now I feel you, and know you are like him.

How long have I huddled here in the crawl space beneath,
Wound in this slick tarp, my limbs bound immobile,
Contorted in their dying throes? Time is nothing.
I was not and now I am. And you made me again.

You are like him, I observed, in so many ways.
Like him, so selfish and thoughtless and jealous,
As if all others were but toys of your imagining,
For your own amusement. You think of them,
Never knowing they think of you,
And (more unimaginable) think not of you at all.

I felt your rage as you struck her; that, I think, began it.
Now I know much, free of the body’s impediments:
Slow chemicals seeping through lumps of stolid flesh,
Telling only what can be told in light, heat, and pressure of air.
This life is different: I am because I desire to be—
And what is anger but lust for existence thwarted?

Observe the earth of a bare hill when rain falls:
The first shower carves shallow channels in the dust,
And all following drops seek the same path,
Widening and deepening. So your rage flows into me,
Filling and following the long-dry gullies, till,
Like a moth shrugging loose its renewing husk,
Life swells the vessels, withered wings shudder and straighten,
And the frail hollow thing is made strong.
So your fury is answered by mine.

You do not know I am here; perhaps no-one knows but him.
What might he have said? “She has left me,
She has gone to her mother, she is staying with friends,
She has run off with the milk man.” Nor do I know why:
Perhaps excess of drink, the hair on his coat that was not mine,
The way I chewed toast. Even so I hate him—and you are like him.

I heard your screams last night—she burned your taters, hmm?
Did you know your voice cracks and squeaks like a schoolboy’s?
I laughed at you, stupid man. But it was enough:
My decayed tendons flexed, crushing the mouse in my fist.

Oh, please—be angry again tonight!