She Caws For Help But Her Only Friends Have All Flown Poem by Ted Sheridan

This woman has only Ravens for friends
She talks to them through the foggy wired windows of her room in the morgue
They gaggle back like gossiping black geese in the surrounding trees
As she reads aloud for them from the tear stained pages of her “autobioautopsy”
Written from her own life experiences with death
And penned by the unnamed ghosts which possess her mediastinal emptiness
Each word bears the marks of a Demon or some Pentecostal priest
Sent to return her to the grave from which she escaped
Meant to die as an embryonic sacrifice she bled instead
Her mother to death
As some physician ignored his Hippocratic Oath
And cut her umbilical cord with his teeth
Leaving the scalpel well within her little reach
She harbors her rage in the space rendered void of heart and soul
She attacks with an immune infectious vengeance
Which she inherited from a defective genome
That was later found to only exist
In deep dark halls of the Museum of Unnatural Art
Where her biological father was a curator of the after dark
Deviations between parenting and beguiling
So at least she comes by everything she owns honestly
As far as anybody knows
And this may explain why this woman has only Ravens for friends…


(2007)