It was built on air and ghosts…it was truly beautiful but it died…because it tried to get real and it was never real. - Anne Sexton

They could not listen.
They could not stop.
What they did was the death dance.
What they did would do them in.

"The Witch's Life"

When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story
window
from behind the wrinkled curtains
and sometimes she would open the window
and yell: Get out of my life!
She had hair like kelp
and a voice like a boulder.

I think of her sometimes now
and wonder if I am becoming her.

I am ugly,
submerged in my own past
and my own madness