the asylum of trees

by Irene

What shaped me, in the first world
when everything was spruce,
pristine like a morning star.

But I wasn’t the apple of
an indulgent cat’s eye,
and she’d strap me to a chair
with a small reproachful look,
blindfolded the sun as if
the world was a compound of dirt-coated sores,
how she secretly foul-mouthed, a sweet-talking
martyr, snuffing shame into honor,
how she inhaled & spat laughter,
balancing the bell jar.

That world was restless, shifting sadness
into ghosts, seeping like a coma,
running in steep shadows cast
on blanketed ground,
& pasted eyelids bizarrely
shut, caught in the drift
of the whistling trees.

I could hardly explain the souls
nestled in the woody labyrinth,
scorched by a latex knife
smudgy with thick glaze,
& purged of any knowing.

Image via Reena

Process notes: Here’s a poem I wrote channelling into a dark brain. Defy me if your brain is full of lavendar. The trees are there alright, but hardly an ode to a tree, as Neil Reid of We Write Poems would have us write this week. It’s probably the wintry trees that suggested such a mental landscape, provided by Brian Miller of D’Verse Poets Pub. The words came via Brenda Warren of The Sunday Whirl. And yea I just finished reading The Bell Jar. That probably explains it. Don’t you, like me, feel the need for illumination?