Celluloid Cigarette Burns

This poem was inspired by the first fifteen minutes of the 2014 film The Scribbler, which was quite boring and its pacing awful, but it posed enough of a feminist problem involving using multiple personality disorder to justify a young woman’s lust that I couldn’t leave it unpondered, even though I left the film itself unfinished

__________________________________

I watched the camera obscura play back the scene of a woman

claiming dissociative personality disorder as a reason

for finding the crimson flower in a man’s bed

only when she was possessed of this new age demon

of psychology could she fly to the summit in her mind

which let her breathe out the phrase “And god said it was good”

We let this serpent coil around her in terror,

the one that whispered, “even here, you are not your own,

even here, you can see the hues of regret

coming to stain your picnic blanket

violet red”

Like a child’s maze toy, she is the silver ball

that a baby will never allow to go home

If the Toddler wills the winding,

she will be the Moses of this Legion of Self

she divided so that no one would truly know

who built the hollow golden calf with which

she plotted her escape into the desert night

When pleasure needs justification,

especially those which involve breaking the mirror

to decide which fragment looks best under black light lust,

then we know our heroine is losing

we have to send in an air team of deus ex,

a package of girl scout cookies with fortune

scrolls reading some speech about Amore

sustained under a rainless sky