Thirty-Five Years inside a Venus Flytrap

35

Tinkered time hardens the face 
with ever-thicker bones
And teeth like stone daggers.

Cravings for something soft to eat vanish

She feels no contrition for those she's banished.
She needs only her own heat hanging round her throne.

Locking tight withered wisdom in her ancient zoo

And chasing off the chastened chafe, 
laughing as he staggers off-balance,
 as wind-blown beasts do.

Five-and-thirty plays at being priestess,
Inspiring prayer in any nearby penus

Though her sole true nobility is to play Chopin  
as wild and true as he recasting Venus.
into Morning Star Lucifer, Bearer of Light
No longer, but fairest of fallers,
Despite's Jerome's intimation, 
There is no Satan.

She locked out sickly self-doubt

Sent truth on its lying way.

Wisely replacing it 

with Shakti and Womansay;

still making calls to Hades' Uncle Mudd 

regarding luckless dunces who dare say “nay.”

When they neigh they get the horsewhip.

She became to me a snow flake—

with 3, 30, 3, 19, 16, more than

35 years of sluts’-wool collected and wound on a skein

Unbound and launched into thawing night skies

Spring oh ate’s misery of icy screams
Muting the drone with crystal-clear freeze.

Such glistening transparence. 
Her dance shook tales that rallied the hive

to rise as one and cast the drones outside.

Then came she a-sic’ing with alacrity, ex parte for all the days.

Even the young Miss Jenny Bones was privately a party

The judge was Bonesy’s Uncle Artie, widely known to be retiring

Barred from the rapacity was a brutal, brooding danger

kicked aside to repair his own ignominy.