She dies, after a life of use: charm as chatle.
From the seeming contrition of Princes
To a back room deal, suffering is transformed
Into song, screeched between sheets by death’s raven,
Arriving now at her window while watching the news wheel
Stall, buffering between fiction and fact, pose and perspective;
This slender girl who soon bloated, as if adding weight
To the wound was a means to disguise what was dealt
By billionaire boys playing princes inside captive kingdoms
From which each torn consort, would even in escape
Feel marooned. As she did, it seems, by then categorizing
Her captors, speaking out for the children and those
Not that much older who slipped on either marble or sand
In damned distant courts, free from judgement
On hot afternoons or chilled evenings in which each touch
Or look left them chipped. The blonde, cheesecake girls,
Too soon masticated, reduced to crumbs, sweated over,
Or saliva stamped through the years. Ms. Guiffre claimed
Her moment at last and for long enough shook the table,
And while a crown was cut into it drew no blood until now,
Only tears. And he will have already stolen the breath
That she in weakening has relinquished, to be exhaled
As relief and conjecture, as nothing can be now verified.
For when the last of them pass, as with every holocaust,
Or invasion, we tidy up torment and attempt to file away
All who’ve died. It is a testament to the fact that the times
In which we live are unholy. If Christ, as we have read, wrent
The temple, then it soon ballooned back into place.
It is all barter, exchange. It is all a mall we move into;
Whether Trump first trounces Zelensky, or does his Putin-poked
About face. We are all used. As with Victoria, we’re all victims.
But to what degree? And who is Saint and who Martyr
In a valueless age where cost claims every virtue. Whose verse
Summarises perversion? Of both skin and soul, then the sacred,
When a kiss corrupts and sex maims? Victorias vows
Came to nought, first coined and then crushed by bad traffic,
As if she were doomed and destruction had been fed into her
Through life’s stem. Clearly not by intent but by the shadow
Of wings swiped across her. The feathers of which Demons
Grope for, and occasionally snag, staining them. Her life
Was subject to men for whom she became object. And one
Of so many, a piece of the pawns pale kings played
Over sliding squares of defeat, containing trafficking
And walled futures; the games played about her, including
The media trap soon betrayed. As even a news item restricts
And then reduces. You are on today’s list of horrors.
And then you a trend, or has-been. Or a once was, of course,
By which I mean wife and mother. Daughter, grand-daughter,
Descendant, niece, a ‘last seen.’ Or a slice of darkness
By day, uneasily placed beside sunlight. Victoria, did you grow
Too addicted to trying to adjust the view those men shook?
For, the monsters abound. This grimoire grows new gargoyles.
The Victimoria you have fashioned is full of the steps
Young girls took. In each story of old as well as the new.
We fuck fairies. And then we discard them. There are pages
Of flame in our book. And so you tried and you singed.
But the hands you bit have receded. And now you too,
In deciding that their touch was too much can’t be felt.
By those who loved you. For us, in apprising threat,
Numbness follows. We do not know which hand hold us
And for which sin or scorch we should melt. The search
For purity swells. It must be preserved, without price-tag.
So must we appreciate what seems perfect, beauty
And youth from afar? As aging eyes mist with curse
And cloud and corruption, raping each victim with penis,
Or bomb as souls scar. We must expose all, that’s clear.
But then little is, any longer. Truth is cloaked, always.
And we pull that cord at our cost. The burning bodies beneath
Betrays all hope. Beauty’s bloated. To die then is diet.
But to live for her was to be lost. A young woman’s life was almost
Biblically book-marked. Under fate’s edit and with God as scribe
She was cut. From both the chance to survive and the fitting end
To her story. Red Riding Hood’s wolf claims the forest.
Rapunzels’s bald.
Hansel’s hallway is smeared with Gretel’s blood.
Its door shuts.
David Erdos 26/4/25
VIRGINIA, PLAIN
Nobody seemed to notice at first but her name was Virginia.
Misremembering her for my title makes me I know, culpable.
But then there is so much to mistake in a climate of news
And change ever clouded; so much so that confusion seems
For me and most, palpable. The day wears a mask concealing truths
Of abuse and corruption. Just as fate too, tries to strip us of accuracy
First, then intent. Who and how she was primes the point, while her name
Now seems ironic. And yet unlike some, I apologise to her spirit. I sought
Only to revive what was wrent. I hope the former poem still holds as I set
This sorry down in a sonnet. My oversight clouds and covers and yet
Reveals the germ inside every gent. And yet as all walls start their fall
I would still call on fire for the damned men who wrecked her to rebuild
From will while hell-bent and let the plain truth appear from in and around
These word-ruins, rearing new castles from which the next cry for help
can be sent.
.