Personality Disorder
I need to say this
though you’re six years dead,
though your lover’s retired
from the operating theatre.
She won her knowledge
in the manner of privilege
like stolen carrion
from a 3 week training stint
on a psych ward –
preferred stitch-up medicine.
About me and my scars,
you were both wrong.
My personality is as ordered
as a breviary
it sings Lord of the Dance
every time it remembers death
recites the Quadratic formula
each blue morning –
it’s as ordered as a heart
that’s been broken
by Antarctic parents
then glued together
with the drool of donkeys
by Betsy Trotwood.
My obese personality
is an anarchist on Fridays.
It collects rejections,
transforms
them when asleep
into Cornell shadow boxes,
and divining rods
made from twigs
and acorn caps.
It refuses to smoke
adulterated tea or wear a cow-bell.
It tolerates insults, limericks
and text messages from institutions.
People say my personality
has nice hair because
it makes rug mats
out of vows, confesses more
perfectly than a scalpel –
it knows what it doesn’t know,
and keeps its mouth shut
like a locked door
on an acute ward.
© Pauline Rowe
Mrs L’s Dream of Home
It was a magic trick you did, the chicken brick ,
the pine dresser in the tiny kitchen, the blue and white
Habitat apron on the back door, a full collection of
blue Cookery volumes collected every week to make you
a perfect wife while the man did his shifts to bring home the bacon.
Yet I was the perfect wife, missing school to let you live out
a dream on my skin, as I lay still looking at the print
of a girl with a pearl earring on the Council House wall
as you promised me a home and told me we should keep
this secret until you were ready to make your escape.
© Pauline Rowe
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