Abuse of Power, Power of Abuse

Leave me to solve riddles,

in the dark ruminations

puzzling with pieces

slipping through my fingers.

They have long legs and,

until now, ran faster than I could;

but I have sprouted legs of my own, and

the caramel is dripping

from your polluted apple

revealing a leprous underbelly

and the twists of your myths.

Since released

I write my farewell to arms,

though I know it will not pierce your heart.

I have learned the impossible

remain impossible, impervious,

and must rule

without question,

without consequence.

I write to pierce my own

and release your venom

to drip, to flow,

to collect in puddles at my feet.

While ash and toxicity

paint bleak the petrified forest

where once hearts of

children tried to play,

before you caught them, taught them,

deftly smothered them in your decay.

I have escaped, but intermittently I

perchance upon your minions,

try as I may, when near,

I cannot blind the stench from my nostrils

from the blood

on their hands.

My blood

mind you, cries out for justice,

and like Abel’s,

is heard.

Copyright 2012 Jennifer Wagner

Linked to dVerse Poets OpenLinkNight

The Telling

she carpeted her windswept fears with conversational banality

every time he chanced upon her truths

when those raw elements exuded from her blood to her tissues

she could hold them back no longer

she had no more strength to restrain

those flooding fibers,

the secret self, less understood but more familiar even

than the blouse of self-belittlements she had grown accustomed to

with tremulous hand she peeled back the covers of her deathbed

confession

when the things she could never say

began to drip, horrifyingly, from her lips

she knew she’d been dying to tell him

it was death not to

Copyright 2012 Jennifer Wagner 
Linked in the 1st Anniversary Edition of dVerse Poets Pub OpenLinkNight