The Little Girl Inside

She lives behind the epidermis
of my skin, covered with red
gashes and bone-white scars,

She sits and taunts and
haunts me, as she always has
and always will,

She waits until darkness
falls and I have sunken deep
into the coma-like death of
cold sleep,

My heartbeat erased to almost nothing...

Once she sees my vulnerability
from the inside, her tiny, child
spindle-fingers lace through the
xylophone of my ribs, wrapping,
winding, clutching with all of her
might...

& she cracks them apart...

I shriek and wake, jolted
upright in bed, cats mewling,
having been roused from slumber,
staring at my frame - arch-backed
as a smooth, crescent moon,

I cannot scream for the pain...

She punches her fist
past my sternum, & I
hear it clink on the floor
somewhere in the room,
landing between the crinkled
backing of Marya Hornbacher
and Christ, himself,

& she sinks her little
fingernails into my skin
from the inside out, digging
her way out of my soul like a
pale-faced, empty-eyed corpse
from my flesh-grave,

& she does know that I will soon perish...

She possesses the strings that hold
me and contain me - her plaything, a
marionette - she swings me to my
cupboards where the thousands of
rainbow colored pills lay in wait
for my immediate consumption,

Jerking my wrists this way
and that, my Puppet Master,
she has me take everything in sight,
and then off to the dresser drawers
we return, where she keeps my
razorblades "just in case"...

& she turns my strings just right
and I slit my wrists "just so"...and
she smiles with her black, hollow
little eyes that gleam a bubbling,
foaming hatred for him, for me
and everything else that ever was
or will be...

& we sit together and have
a tea party, while the pills and
blood loss become my fatal
delirium,

& we are playing Alice in Wonderland and
I am Alice, she is the Mad Hatter, and
I have eaten the cake and drank the bottle
of poison, but I am neither large nor small,
for I am dead now...

& she pours my corpse another cup of magic tea...