I had a friend who thought he’d discovered me,
like some lost continent that rose from the sea last week,
a geological miracle, while everyone else was too busy paying their bills or playing video games to notice.
He didn’t know I’d been there all along,
which anyone could see if they’d bothered to look.
He parked his little flag and staked his claim.
He thought he knew my secrets, spilled out over cheap coffee
with limitless refills in the early morning hours,
just because I could dance the jig of the tortured artist
across imaginary coals,
sometimes with knives in my teeth.
It’s not my fault he believed it.
He thought I’d sliced off a piece of my soul
and forked it onto some bone-cheap plate for his inspection,
still dripping with pathos and angst, making the usual mess.
He thought I needed him to guard it with his life,
to consult it like a thermometer,
burning up one day, frozen the next.
He imagined me at home fondling tins of lighter fluid,
playing with the knobs on the gas range,
and called to see if I had a plan, prepared to intervene,
my self-appointed angel.
How could I disappoint him?
I made up a story about running my car in neutral in the garage,
so no one would find me until I was done,
cooked that remarkable carbon monoxide shade of pink.
It’s not like a few all-nighters stoked by coffee
that bored me into false confessions
gave him the key to break the garbled code of my life.
It’s not like I’m some half-mad woman, or for rent,
paid to be seen around town in the company of strangers,
and I’m not a fad, either, or the flavor of the week,
half a world away from vanilla people
who drive sensible cars and floss their teeth twice daily.
I’m not gonna sit on anybody’s windowsill between flower pots,
or on a fat mantel under some stuffed, grim-eyed swordfish.
It doesn’t matter if I’m a simple-minded dolt
or a clever, black-hearted witch with eyes in the back of my head.
I still walk and talk and eat;
I answer the telephone when it rings;
I clip my coupons and store them in a jar.
So what if sometimes I like to leave the scissors splayed wide open on the floor?
And smile a little when I cut myself by accident
with the dull paring knife?
A woman should have some scars.
