The Oven

I was reading about you.
Someone wrote about you.
How could they not?
Your darkness swirled into our minds through those words,
those thin ink soldiers of doom marching in:
The garden, the sky, the father you never understood…
Hovering, the witches taunting your muse.
You were right under the porch, nobody knew…

I'm sorry, but you wrote these things that made us love you.
I think that's what you wanted, that love.
I know the nights were empty.
I know you wanted to be the best mother
and the best writer
and it was so easy for him, he sat, he wrote
and he wanted his dinner.
Then he left and someone else made his dinner.
You and the little ones and your proper voices were alone.

I lived in such a small apartment though it was nice, charming even,
U shaped and facing the large yard and garden.
A cat ramp for my beautiful Mainecoon led to the wooden stairs outside.
I had a gas oven and just enough counter space.
I lived on lentils and potatoes and curry and rice
all mixed together.

I had been up all night at the studio recording a dark album with an obscure band.
16 hour days and things went south when peaty scotch entered the picture
but we carried on like foggy soldiers.
I finally fell asleep at about 3 am as my cats curled and curled and curled into themselves.

You were always first to appear in my mind as I drifted off, that face,
so sweet, until one looked at the eyes and the arch of the eyebrows.
Innocence haunted by devilishness in those orbs, though I know that was not your intention.
The evidence is there; loot from the camera box soul thief, there on the pages of your life.

Somehow, those eyes, and your story
made me fall for you, a dead girl who stuck her head in the oven that night
in London, while a stifling winter suffocated the narrow streets, you could hardly go outside but to get food for your children.
You put towels under the door.
This was to be your punishment only.
I had a crush on a dead girl?
How sad, living girls were only my friends when I wanted their touch.

The night had fallen like it sometimes does; secretly.
And there I was, mouth agape, maybe snoring,
cats curled and curled and curled into themselves.
Your face was there, you were on the beach at Cape Cod, sun bouncing off of your porcelain skin,
or you were in the library in London as rain fell tapping the thick, gilded glass,
staring into nowhere over an open book.
You were in New York, wide-eyed in the big city at the magazine publisher's office.
And you were right under the porch, nobody knew…
What we now know is the reverse of your fears; the world was actually not ready for you, Dear.
Your Panic Bird fluttered all over us, I'll never wash my soul again.

My mind formed the words 'I have a crush on you, I'm sorry, I know you are long passed from this world but here,
here in dreams, I can admire you as if you are living..."

Then she stood in my kitchen.

I was still floating, half in this body, half...somewhere...do we ever know where, really?
Somewhere between the dead, the almost dead, the living playing dead; we call it sleep…
There she stood her eyebrows in that arch and those eyes!
Black as blood, weapons of the underworld now, the witches were now her keepers.
The roots were her bed, the gulls her warning and the crows…

Outside my apartment crows gathered in a tree like they do at times,
In those parliaments of dark, reminders to the upperworlders that we are only here for a minute.
30 crows in a tree, cawing, cawing, cawing out of themselves.
Then suddenly, as if an agreement had been reached...silence. That is when she had appeared.
Those eyes hated me.

"How dare you!!" She hissed, standing by the oven in my small kitchen, as if she were forever chained to ovens.

"You have no right...You do not know me!!! You cannot have a crush on me!!! I am not among you. You do not know what I have been through!!!"

My terror was ice. My soul skipped a beat. My testicles shriveled into their holes, like when I
was a boy.
Just as I woke, the crows flew away all at once.