My Verse, how like Radon

All of my poems are my children, all of my works are my children.  With my books I tried to spoil them and well they are all fat but very happy children.  Now I’m not the slimmest fiddle in the kit and I would never judge anyone for that – that would be stupid. 

But I felt my children could be stronger so with – most of- my poems, honestly, I am a deliberately horrible mother, some sort of Victorian workhouse stereotype, constantly birthing children and then abandoning them to the universe.

I prefer to think of myself as Echidna, or Charybdis if we’re honest but now I’m splitting hairs.

I do love them, and I do check on them, and try to give them a good start and hope they find a home but at the end of the day I only know what happens to the ones that get adopted, that find a home.

The rest? I shudder at the thought. It is perhaps best not to ask.

Maybe though this is how poets die.

Maybe some night, some night soon, I will wake one final time to find that all of my errant stray and abandoned children have come home, surrounding me in my room. 

Ready to take vengeance on the mother that left them.

I’m sure they’d have help.  

But until that final night I will sit here smiling at my tea set in my gas mask and urge you all to every now and then fumigate your home for old poems. 

Like Radon, old unwanted poems are the silent killer.

 

This has been a reminder to always spay and neuter your spawn.  

-the Maenad