Mama's Night Out

(This poem is about when my daughter was very young and at the time I was screwed up emotionally, partying all night at clubs and doing drugs... It concerns the guilt I felt and how eventually it led me to change.)



my reflection in your Christmas portrait
little thing of peaches and cream sighs
Mama a ghoul, around her eyes
fuming a grave deliberately drenched in blue

dancing on the catafalque
like a resurrected banshee
stink of corpses, Camels, and Cuervo
on her clothes
back at home an erratic heartbeat
thought she’d sizzle come sunrise
pulled out a trembling piece of paper
and wrote you a note
to toss another pinch of flaming eye-of-newt
into this witch’s brew of betrayal

I should have been with you
inhaling your essence
instead of snorting bitter sugar
from plastic spiders’ eggs
that made me talk starry-eyed
of things best left in dreams