The Disquieting Muses

The Disquieting Muses

“I learned, I learned,
I learned elsewhere,
From muses unhired
by you, dear mother.”
—Sylvia Plath, The
Disquieting Muses

De Chirico, de Chirico—
Where did you learn—to paint
So nightmarishly—so surreally
These strange—inhuman mannequins
All of them ill-bred—and rude?

Disfigured and unsightly—
With heads like—darning-eggs
Who can’t talk—or see or say
What’s bugging them—half-baked
Like a witch’s—gingerbread boy?

De Chirico, de Chirico—
Words can’t describe—the horror
I feel when—your spectral beings
Loom into view—dumb, eyeless
With stitched bizarre—bald heads.

At least with—Oscar Wilde
And his The Picture of Dorian Gray
There’s something—to look at
Up there in—the spooky, scary attic
A painting that—changes obscenely

But all your—eerie cityscapes
Don’t change—one little bit at all
It’s like El Duce—won the war
And everything—got frozen
Still in awful—stark fascismo

At least with—Edvard Munch
His painting—The Scream
It really screams—and shrieks
It gives me—chills & goosebumps
It’s got a terrifying—soundtrack

But your—The Disquieting Muses
With its dead—and silent landscape
Its grim, gothic—stoic silence
It’s more like a—film noir vacuum
Shadows cast—by silent movie stars