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“Out with the Muse . . . ”
Joanne Limburg

The Muse is clear to him at last:
She has the precise levelling
Of the Golden Calf, the sunlight
Pirouetting along each line
Of her form, so that every distraction
Around her retreats into darkness.

She is a poet; eccentric as amchur;
Isolated at school lunch,
Scratching away her skin
To gain some control
Over feelings of divine desertion;
Feelings so cutting
That anyone would worship the Baal.

They surge her from Yahweh
To the serpent and back,
From the opium poppies of Eden
To the thorns and thistles to the East
Such that every daily minutiae
Must be inscribed on scrolls,
Like laments at the Exile.

In a way, she is weeds in the ploughed field:
In her family depression, miscarriages,
And premature cancer
Choke out the barley; Herem, unclean,
Cursed to the third and fourth generations:
Her mother leaves the muse’s niece
In soiled nappies; acid and demanding attention
From the son, who soon takes his own life.
Her father is cigarettes and corpulence,
But submissive as Job

Unlike the muse who is thrown between
Burning bushes of temper,
And Christ-like cries of abandonment,
So that, sometimes, like Nebuchadnezzar,
And like him, she copes
By casting herself in gold

And she thinks, she thinks,
More profoundly than Solomon
And performs; a Stanmore Miriam.
This Bathsheba knows the Heavens’ stars
And the darkness over the deep.

The Muse appears as his female twin,
And she draws him in to the Sheol within her,
Where at first life seems as Song of Songs,
Into laughter, then into the Samarian pool of his own madness,
Where only an un-amusing woman
Can stop him from drowning in himself

Copyright © 2025 Lucius Falkland
All Rights Reserved

Lucius Falkland is the nom de plume of a writer and academic originally from London. His poetry has appeared in such journals as Obsessed With Pipework, Snakeskin and Society of Classical Poets.