Madness in women takes a particular form

It doesn’t snarl and lash out with the muscular

Intentionality of a male pit-bull, intent on savagery

Nor dissolve into rumination and despair like

Much used handkerchief incapable of holding more tears

No. Madness in women is like epilepsy

It creeps up unawares, whispering in your ear all the while

Maybe you won’t have another fit, perhaps you’re free

Of that taint, rendering you fallow, unthriving, jerking

Puppet without strings, held up by electric vault, the brain

A tormentor, a God, the plague, salvation

Madness in women has no tongue, no eyes

It feels blindly in the yellowing dusk of losing all

Ash in pockets weighing down, the taste of old

Wallpaper in the air like they just dropped another bomb

Eventually madness pins women in the middle of this locked room

A writhing insect needing no further dissection

And still they will come, with their sharpened knives and words

Still, they will pit her, with tarnish and shame

Till if she were not lost, lost, lost

She’d be sewn so tightly that nothing will escape

Save the wan light leaching from captivity

The drone of dying bees driving themselves into glass

A halo of dust motes dizzies in suffocating, breathless air

Where she can never open the window, scream bloody murder

Climb out, fall, puncture her beating heart on something sharp

And watch the introduction of crimson possess

An otherwise monochrome madness.

Photo by Camila Quintero Franco on Unsplash

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Read more of Candice Louisa Daquin’s work at The Feathered Sleep and at Whisper and The Roar. You can also follow her Facebook – Candice Louisa Daquin & The Feathered Sleep.