PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Oh, that was thirty-seven years ago;

and she is dead---still celebrated as

a novelist of extraordinary

imagination, my stepsister, Mary.

Her memory, in England, is held sacred;

to me, that just extends my rage and hatred

for her, and all her stupid books and tales.

Often I think back to that sight of her,

one day in June, an early morning hour:

clad scantilly in her cropped nightshirt and

those sky-blue, thigh-high socks (the soles grass-stained

from her brief walkabout, outside, at dawn),

scribbling the words of the ghost story she

had thought of in response to Lord Byron's---

my former lover's---proposition of

a ghost story contest among us five.

Of course, he really meant just four of us:

he knew I had no skill at all with words.

And anything I might have written would

have been only a shallow imitation

of something else.  And thus, this aggravation

with my stepsister and her dilligence

scribbling that ragged first draft that became

her novel, Frankenstein.  I think she did

feel sorry for that monstrous wretch of whom

she dreamed of one late June night while in bed

with Percy Byshe, who really wanted me

but slept with her.  Yet whenever did she

feel---or make some effort to feel---for me

the least of any human sympathy,

much less a real---profound---comradery.

Of course, I was not nearly as well-read

as she was (home-schooled by the many books

her father owned); truthfully, I had no

desire to read at all.  But, stupid as

a rock that blocks the plowman's dented plow,

I had no choice but this:  to imitate

her any time I could, and, if that failed,

to mess with her mind and her feelings, and

to do so for the bloody fun of it.

She whored herself to Shelley, so I spread

my legs for Byron (and he also knew

that Percy Byshe desired---and was obsessed

with---me, but slept with her; I guess those socks

gave him some small attraction to her).  That

about sums up my whole relationship

with the late Mary Shelley, author of

The Last Man . . . Perkin Warbeck . . . Valperga . . .

Lodore . . .Faulkner . . . and that damned Frankenstein.

Who, tell me who---please---can hope to compete

with that kind of stellar accomplishment?

Daily, even hourly, those titles swirl

through my soul to remind me of my gross

incompetence with words---that I cannot

assemble a short story much less a

full novel.  Is it any wonder to

you that I resent the hell out of her

and her books, and her much undeserved fame?

I whored myself to Byron, that clubfoot,

because she whored to Percy Byshe, although

he wanted me yet always slept with her.

And so I was compelled to mess with her;

my purpose in life is to mess with her.

Though she is dead, I will not cease from this---

the only way that I can prove myself,

the only way to be remembered now.

When we arrived at Byron's rented house,

the Villa Diodati, she told me

that John Milton, the Poet, once stayed here.

I did not even know who Milton was.

A cropped nightshirt, and sky-blue, thigh-high socks

(the soles grass-stained from walks at dawn's first light);

scribbles on pages, almost too sloppy

to be deciphered, that, in time, become

the path to my stepsister's dubious fame,

and monsters that her books became to me:

monsters that well deserve the wrath and ire

that met the thing that Frankenstein had put

together from the carcasses he snatched.

Toward her achievement, I shall always bear

a most resentful, seething and raw hatred---

not too early, and never, now, belated.

Starward