More poetry

I was reading the Aeneid and I got to my least favorite part - Dido's death. So I wrote this as a retort to the unnecessary death of a brilliant female character.



Oh, Please, Aeneas

Dido, Queen of Carthage
Threw herself off a wall
For you?

Yeah, right, Son of Venus.
You and I know the truth.

You’re dick-sizing with Odysseus about the
women you both left behind.
He claims Calypso, the unflagging nymph, begged him to stay, but he tired of her, even after she promised him immortality.

I hear your juvenile response across the centuries.
Oh, yeah? Well, a QUEEN killed herself for love of ME and our lands became mortal enemies until my descendents destroyed her city and sowed it with salt.

Nauseating.
A queen is strong.
She keeps her wits.
Go ahead. Dump her, sail away like the
skulking coward you are.
She will rise, triumphant,
send her elephants trumpeting through your
backyard.
And not until Quintus Fabius will she be defeated,
only after
years of struggle and a waste of power.
You had nothing to do with that victory.

You are so not worthy of a queen’s pain.

You lied, Aeneas.
There was no funeral pyre. You know she
put on her jeweled sandals,
strode through the city she owned.
She wouldn’t let a panderer ruin her proud name.

Occasional poetry.

Here's an original poem I call Emergency Surgery.

I miss you like a tumor I didn’t know I had.

I never noticed the weight of you, suppressing delicate nerves,
until you were gone.

I took you out, a surgery to save my life,
now an enormous aching hole in my skin where once there was a familiar mass.
I miss the pain I had grown to know and even,
to love just a little.
I destroyed something that made me beautiful.

There’s room now for something healthy to grow there,
room for vitality to breathe and stretch.
Whatever is planted in that deep abyss will bloom, thanks to you being gone, no longer taking
nutrients and energy away from my beauty.

Until then, though,
I miss your poison, simply because
I was used to it.