The World's Wife

Girls, forget what you’ve read.

It happened like this –

I did everything in my power

to make him look back

it was time to turf out the blighter,

the beater or biter,

who’d come like a lamb to the slaughter

to Salome’s bed.

The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil’s wife

which made me worse. I howled in my cell.

If the Devil was gone then how could this be hell?

He held my heart in his fist and he squeezed it dry.

There are bullet tears in my eyes.

Are you terrified?

Be terrified.

It’s you I love,

perfect man, Greek God, my own;

but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray

from home.

So better by far for me if you were stone.

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy

grew in my mind,

which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes,

as though my thoughts

hissed and spat on my scalp.

No man

has been loved more. I’m sure that, sometimes, in his silent death,

against my massive, breathing lungs, he hears me roar.

Fevered, I drank

handfuls of river right by the spot where he’d bathed.

I swore in my huge heart

to follow him then to the ends of the earth.

For he wouldn’t stay here.

I keep Faust’s secret still –

the clever, cunning, callous bastard

didn’t have a soul to sell.