She’s like totally schizo
Screwy, psycho, silly, disturbed
Like retarded or something
Daft, demented, strange, deranged
See how she walks and mutters
She’s crippled, crazy, cracked
I wish I had a peg leg like that
People don’t expect anything from her

These words inscribed in television
Movies, schools, at work, legislated
These words become natural
Like wrinkles, frown lines, crows feet
From embarrassed smiles
Incision marks drawn forcefully
Across forearms and legs
Across countless bodies
Made silent and fragile
From centuries of exclusion

Balmy, batty, bonkers, berserk
That girl must be challenged
Mental or immoral, certainly not normal

I’m crazy, I have the scars to prove it

My hazel eyed cyborg with curling blue hair
Walks wearing leather bound steel leg prostheses
Confidently roaming down the bright side walk
Sipping a soy milk mocha with a gluten free fruit bar

My new wave old school cyberpunk babe
Her boots double as instruments of artful noise
She pounds and teases the lead sounds out
Coupled with her deep amber lipped mouth

My night creature croons like Lauren Bacall
With deep intimate knowledge of cult and film noir
Weaving between dimly lit cantina tables
Just put your lips together and blow

Appropriating surplus cash from imperceptive patrons
She replaces funds with anonymous business cards
Her sneaky streak runs in a need to graffiti
With decadent stencils of ray-gun erotica

She’s a mechanical girl, mistress of wires and cables
Neuromancing spirals of circuitry to create an odyssey of sound
She flicks switches to entice several small speakers
Kept secret in a tweed suitcase for low radar travel

My willowy marijuana woman grows her own
With delicately laid tubes of varying fluids
Flowing into her voluptuous Sun God buds
Breathed out with aqueous sighs of smoke

My ganja earth goddess
My cybernetic mistress
She is the queen of noir

we are right next door
in shelters, side walks and safe injection sites
we are the crazies, modern werewolves out in the full moon
in your eyes, in your backyard

fugitives from T4 euthanasia, delegated to death
hereditary defectors sleep here unacceptable
your pictures of childlike incompetent criminals
lurk in your backyard

escaped from Arkham asylum
Boris Karloffs and Anthony Hopkins stroll the streets
we are the mad maniacs, psycho-killers
silent behind cultural masks, in your backyard

clearly insane donkey riding cross dressers
disturb the normals without medication in Mount Pleasant
us crazies are coming out of the closet
coming out of the merciless language of madness, in your backyard

certifiably bonkers, we are the unnatural spectacles
cartoonish serial sex killers and crazed car-jackers creep
seeking your normal perfect bodies for unseemly appetites
as police-doctors say, in your backyard

your little ones need expensive protection
prescribe electroshock solitary confinement
with legally recognized “repressed psychotic character”
segregate us to the streets, homeless and sterilized

unworthy within Mount Pleasant fences

not in anyone’s backyard

Pinned beneath the icy ceiling
Concealed in a canvas sack,
I crumple cold choked

Keep complacent in custodial care
Send backward brats to ‘summer school’
Seclude ‘garbage can kids’
Categorize biological markers
Throw the cats in the river
Leaving nameless snowy tombs

Not silent yet but with
Teeth extracted,
Can’t tear through the cloth

Allocate identities with analysis
Examine for research suitability
Special education to segregate
Genetic intelligence tests
Announce unwanted children
Ready for plucking

In the antiseptic icebox
Claws creep catching
My jacket escape

Sacrificial victims to the cure
Vaccines for the normals
Negate natural violations
With veterinarian needles
Separate from sound minds

The New Westminster School
Never closes the cold extinction,
In government care.

Hygienic facades hide biological laws
Social policies painted in pale pea green
Nurses and doctors conduct Common Sense
In the province’s castration court
We prosecute genetic codes
Your mentally defecting threats
Immigrate from hidden homes
Unmarried women, First Nations, children
These imbeciles must be stopped
They’re costing us our cleanliness
Such inheritable criminal traits
Crave compulsory sterilization
Stored in unseen institutions in the interim
The chalk walls lobotomize organs
Isolate pathogen, exert control
Locate not legally competent tool
Not realistic for living
Throw this one away
It’s not docile enough

Expecting depression and death seems gruesome
Directing disabled bodies to an easier end
Staring down to the lower wheeled seat
Mourning the living with impolite smiles
Cringe stinging past statements

“Poor thing, does she take sugar?”

Abide, obey, portray the assumption

“I saw your cane, I’m sorry.”

Remember you are not normal

“What’s wrong with you?”

Your body and brain defined

“How did you get that way?”

Remain marginally tagged
As unseen ones scare the children

“Better dead than alive,
Taking my taxes.”

Sitting in the small tiled room

I analyze my skin.

Reflected in the slight askew glass,

My pinkish shape is a specimen

Of compulsive fascination:

A spot of natural white lashes

Unplucked brows.

White newly primed walls and

Frosty fluorescent lighting

Paint me pale.

Ashen eye circles

Stare back

The mask gropes into the cubicle space

Through sanitary tiles and

Alabaster surfaces,

He clutches the doorknob closed

Locked into the antiseptic theatre,

The examination continues

Uninterrupted.

Closer, my skin appears pallor

But crimson speckled

With past pimples and creeping eczema.

The mirror face finds my arms

Seeking the secrets

Exactingly covered.

Careful feelers shift

My limp limbs onto the table

Searching for official insanity stamps

“Tools are required for further investigation.”

Removing makeup

From forearms and wrists

With alcohol and cotton balls,

Waiting sterilized.

“We may begin.”

With crimson wimple
I walk slowly
Down a wire
Of white snow
Under steep reaching poles
Of shadowed beeches
Printing ash spots
Where I’ve paced
Facing forward
Feel behind
Through the brush
Shushing for the catch
Listen through linen
Beyond the ebony
Fingering webs
Groping between
Angular spaces
Heed the hush

Crawl crushing acorns
Breaking branches

Uncover my ears
Bearing amber wisps
Opening auditory folds
Still my steps
To a stop

Staring
With insidious eyes
Sanguine
With black spots
Stuck in charcoal shocks

My legs locked
Shoved in a frosty tuft
Frozen
Closed in the cold coffin
Shrouded in the noiseless snow

Mechanical spokes spin slowly towards home
When rush hour horns hold still,
For a moment, below the deep blue clouds
Between craggy black pines
Porous tubes ooze a membranous smog
Spooling out between steel fenders
The nauseating gauze breathes from machines
Transfixed by the ghosts’ dissent,
The ceremony lit by sulphur lamps.
In a stupor the mediums slumber on
Rolling rumble through the creeping white wisps
Engines move on in inches, catching snippets
Of drowned radio notes tuning past.
Clunking quiver the crusty drudges
Rust whirling toward a creaking frenzy.
Livid machines rush prophetically flailing
Galloping fates fly through the throng
Exuding the smothering fog.

Ripe but barren glistening fruit
Snowy wombs behind store windows
Yielding avatars for the unholy display
Shrines to false idols, fluorescent lit
Without blood, without mercy
Mercurial smiles beckon demons
Through the crystalline entrance
The lifeless flood of followers
Consumed with phantom love
The perfect creatures creep
Receiving their substance
Digesting in mindless mouths
They wait for tomorrow’s sons

Re-Translated from Sylvia Plath’s Munich Mannequins