Lady Macbeth

A poem inspired by the character from Shakespeare's Macbeth, a pastiche of Carol Ann Duffy

Come now is my hour of judgement.
See my fingers tremble, my chest shudder.
My body before me, now cold and bent,
The wretched Witch of Glamis, six feet under, dead.
I was a lover once,
With wild wiry hair.
Me and him, beauty and dunce.
Come ye mortal eyes, were my actions not fair?
For us! For us! From Thane to King,
I supported, I followed,
Faithful first to our rings,
Faithful, I died for what was owed.
But for nothing I died,
Slewn by the love once had between him and I!

Bastard. Pussy. Git.
Funny thing is, now that I’m dead,
I can laugh at all that shit,
Torn from my life just as ridiculously as I was thrust into it.
Did I want the crown? Did I want a kid?
If I had to look at a little head,
with eyes and button nose, cheeks rosy red
knowing it was my keen knife that carved it into a king’s life,
I’d throw myself out a bloody window!
To live sanely, securely, to live without strife,
Is too much to ask as a wife
‘Cause God forbid women have rights,
(and ambitions and assertions and—)

Hm… that felt good.
Felt refreshing, felt bold.
It feels like such a long time ago
I sat lamenting the cries of the crow—
Or was it a raven?—
My own mind, defaced into an echoey haven
of all of the men’s base words and rules.
No more— I socked that incessant raven black and blue.
Hark!— There it hops away, black eye an ugly hue
to drive another one of us mad.
So yes, come ye mortal spirits that pry and judge,
Condemn me here!
Take my woman’s spine for gall?
Nay’, you shan’t.

Tsk. Harrowed and weary above my grave I watch.
There are novels worth of shit we, the Second
Sex, endure— but to what end? The Stories, the Feeling,
the Hatred, the Shame,
the Madness, the poor Crow,
wrongfully harassed (my apologies to the poor thing)
Are maybe all worthy of eyes and ears to care.
But mad woman or faithful wife; I, the Lady with no first name,
will hold my silence as whatever you deem me now;
I’m as dead as dead as dead.