Mad Kate

A severe widow’s peak favoring aquilinity,
nested over a murder of crow’s feet clawing
at her eye’s marge, with fresh, lunatically
hewn laugh lines creasing her etiolated

countenance, these lineaments on her face
presaged those on the page; her fingers vomited
words in widow speak, while anoesis urged the
violence in her closing strokes and the antre-

expelled extempore leading her to destiny;
dolorous and dour, like the oceanside plinth
upon which she was wont to perch, where
wicked waves maieutically persuaded her

already splintered intellect through orphic
repetition, to quash the squawking squall that
drew her nigh, as she craved the embrace of a
kindred spirit; she lost her love to the jealous

sea, but in losing her mind she’d found her apogee;
all that was left behind were the echoes of sanity
that reinforced her descent into madness and the
final wild-eyed dive into providential infamy

art: Mad Kate by Henry Fuseli