Marilyn’s Baby
Daphne Buter

I’ve seen
A small child with blond curls
Marilyn’s baby
He was sitting in a pram between shrubs
That child on a sunny day
ate his mother
and now he still lives in a poetic
Technicolor blue uterus

The boy was blond. I think his eyes were blue. I think his eyes were large. I think his eyes saw things no one else saw. Kids are innocent and he was one of them.

He showed me a picture of his mother. I think his mother was blonde but she dyed her hair like Marilyn Monroe. That’s why the boy believed his mother was a movie star. He fell in love with his mother. Face it. He actually named her Marilyn.

He grew up to become a fat old man.

I was looking for some words to send back after he wrote me a letter. I wanted it to be words that meant something. Words to console the kid, maybe. But all words seemed to get lost in the space between us.

He tried to tell a story but it became a lake without ground and at one point I thought what the fuck is he trying to sell me? I am too poor to buy his shit.

One day someone told me about the abuse. Someone said that his childhood was a cocktail of unbelievably bad stuff. I tried to get the picture but it was like digging dreams.

I tried to understand his poetry. But I had to keep his poems upside down to read them and only then they made some sense. Anger dripped from them. The poet was oozing with anger. I had never experienced so much anger myself. Words build something that staggers between dreams and truth. I thought it had to be a fat poet because fat is anger.

I thought about kids who buy a gun and they go into a school and there they kill with the intention to die because they can’t handle it anymore.

I think all his poems were murder scenes.

The boy was desperate and he wanted people to listen and I said, “Cool, here I am. Send me your weird poems and I will understand them.” And then he sent some and I tried to understand them and I felt stabbed to death.

Well, if heaven exists I am afraid it will be much like Hollywood.

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