There's An Old Woman Slowly Eats Me Alive Poem by Patti Masterman

There's an old woman, slowly eats me alive,
From head to foot; methodically imbibes the firm flesh of my youth;
My cheeks apples; breasts, buttocks,
Overcoming their natural tension, by her teeth's tensile pull;
Her toxic saliva tinting my fingernails yellow, and thickening them
Like an overcooked gravy, in the unyielding skillet of her intention,
Her continuous cooking fires smoking my hair, the same color as soot and ashes.
My hands beginning to shake too, with the palsy, of her unholy desires
That every day be her mealtime again, and that she gets to begin all over again
This daily eating of my flesh, like her own privately observed communion,
Which will continue unabated, until she reaches the inner sanctum
Of my plenum, and parts there the ruby curtains.

Revealed then is that holy grail of my being, palpitating there;
Veins still smooth, uncollapsed, pink and healthy;
And with just a simple touch of her withered hand, it becomes
Another rotten apple, just like all the ones before it,
In a sort of imitation, of the witch bestowing the poisoned apple,
To the princess of the realm, who is still unrecognized, and in hiding;
Almost as if it were the same apple offered to Eve,
That has been secreted also, inside our bodies,
Like a time bomb waiting there, until the garden should arrive
At it's winter season; and the fruit, so long over ripe since the harvest,
Begins to cave in, with inner liquefaction;
The face to sag, and the mouth to hang open,
The eyes losing their focus; the ears, their hearing.

Because all of the knowing contained of the apple
Was in the end only death; it's only inheritance,
For death was the one thing lacking, in that first Garden,
And because we are all of us, her children
Descending from that first sin and falling out,
So that even now, we all look alike, shortly before death;
All we siblings, of Eve's children, with the sunken apples in our cheeks,
As it is the very core of our being; that is rotting from the inside out,
And it is bitter- very bitter indeed, to watch our body's last fruit go to waste.