Lazarus' Lover

Here you are again, at my door:
clawed back from the fall with the same
old call: ‘tell you all, I shall tell you
all’. Well guess what? That’s the last straw.
It’s hard to be amazed
when there’s no audience to enthral
and you’re trailing frayed
paper guts ‘cross the floor. But no
more! Each time you come back back
back to me, your heart bleeds blacker
than blue, but there’s no remorse
for what you put me through. This time,
‘sorry’ just won’t cut it; you can cry
yourself dry for all I care: ‘cause
each time you pop out of thin air, I swear
I’d stick a knife through you before
I’d take you back. Well you can chew
on cut glass all you want
whilst my heart break-
fasts on all the halfboiled sunrises
I’ve spent waiting for you
to stick yourself back together. Sure, there’s glue
on your hands, but blood too - mine from
each time I believed your stories.
Back from the dead? Screw you! I know
how you lie, and how we’ve been tied
by fiction fractious as us – but
no longer. From each bruise
you left in my chest I’ve grown stronger,
and this time, dear lover,
I’m through.

* * *

OK, so this is my entry for the Writers' Workshop workshop on Poetic Monologues. The workshop criteria was quite challenging, and a little out of my comfort zone, so I read up on writing poetic monologues, and one of the examples was Plath's 'Lady Lazarus'. So a lot of the inspiration for this came from that, and from Plath's poem 'Daddy'.

The bit of speech quoted from Lazarus is taken from T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. The actual quote is:
"I am Lazarus, come from the dead,Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"

And the 'form' of the poem (if I should call it that) was inspired by a series of poems written by Carol Ann Duffy that are monologues written from the point of view of the wives of various literary / mythological people, such as 'Mrs Aesop' and 'Mrs Midas', which I saw her perform live recently at the Warwick Words festival (she was amazing!).She has in fact written one called 'Mrs Lazarus', which I didn’t know of until after I wrote this, so mine bears little resemblance.

Oh, and of course, if you don’t know about Lazarus, here's a handy link to the Wikipedia page that should explain all...

The 'Lazarus' she's talking to in the poem is not meant to be the actual Lazarus, by the way, just someone who keeps disappearing and coming back. Call it 'Lazarus Syndrome', if you will. (: