By Celia Bate.
Prologue
On the thousandth Red Moon the world had seen,
Three Witches bore Satan’s baby from a tiny bean.
Marinated in a big black pot of evil water,
The bean grew into a little girl, the Devil’s Daughter.
A bellowing voice poured from the sky, jacinth,
“The girl’s name shall be Absynth!”
From birth, Absynth grew up in Hellfire Marsh,
An upbringing you might think rather quite harsh.
But Absynth liked the melancholy of the place,
Swaddling between reeds, shoving mud down her face
By day she’d dance amongst the fog,
By night she’d lay under a blanket of bog.
She lived like this for a very long while
The watery flats did her beguile.
Until the day she turned eighteen,
Where she found herself, lusting, intellectually keen.
With the brains of the Devil (kin of divinity?),
She managed to make it to the Great College of Trinity.
******
Abby wanders along the Liffey
She, like the river, meandering free.
Her careless steps taking her crest and trough
In her trainers, with their straps broken off.
Laddered tights, black eyes, short bleached-blonde hair:
A tough girl with a kill-a-man kind of stare.
As she walks, she sees a boy,
All tall, slim, gaunt, goofy and coy,
Spiky hair, too-small clothes.
The kind of style Abby’s Father loathes.
As he approaches, his pace slows,
Will he trespass within her throws?
He strides three steps forward and one to the side,
Aligns himself with Abby, his smile smiling wide.
“Shall I throw you over into the river?”
The sound of his words made Abby shiver.
She shot him a cutting black-pupilled glance
But she saw no falter in his prominent stance.
A flash from the future blinds Abby’s sight.
She sees forming between them a bond of great might.
Together, in bed, entangling limbs,
The platonic love, up to the bedside table, brims.
Secrets shared, affectations bestowed
Though in these actions, no love there was sowed.
His name was Lemon and from that day forth,
They became best friends, always headed north.
Until one day, with a change of the wind,
Things went south, the sunlight dimmed.
O’ to return to that perfect friendship, all-consumed,
But alas, no! Predetermination always had it doomed:
Abby marched from her lecture to the benches outside,
And lit a cigarette, “ah, carbon monoxide!”.
She looked around campus, “what a beautiful day”,
Then she saw her best friend, Lemon, and it started to rain:
He was sat down laughing, doing some silly gestures, a dance,
Then she spied Fair Sally, on his lap, with a second, indifferent glance.
“Oh how nice, one more friend!
Another person with whom time, Lemon can spend”.
Abby smiles, and then suddenly stops breathing,
She falls to the floor, violently shaking and teething.
With something new in her body annealing,
She realised what it was: it was a feeling.
On coming to, Abby opens her eyes
To lots of people gazing over her like flies
A dead carcass. “I’m dead to the Devil
I had an emotion. Hey Dad! I’m a rebel”.
“Absynth, are you okay? What happened?”
She gets up, brushes the dust off her lap and
Is taken up in a warm hug by her sweet, blond Lemon.
“I’m fine thanks Lemon, who is your new friend?”
Fair Sally was stood behind him, the little earwig,
Absynth imagining stabbing the little lamb with a twig
That lay by her foot on the ground.
“This is Sally, you’ll love her. She’s sound”.
Abby had felt a feeling like a human,
It was now high time she acted like one.
As Lemon hung out with Fair Sal more and more,
Absynth was convinced his “pure angel”, a whore.
And so she started a most vile, retalliant rumour,
That Sal was a prostitute.
******
Epilogue
Absynth is a good girl, though perhaps a bit scary.
Her beautiful complexion, devilishly lairy.
As a specimen looked carefully upon with a lamp
There’s nothing could be said she ought to revamp.
Though au contraire, from the preceding tale’s vault,
Exposéd, you’re introduced to her sole one and only fault.
Unlike her Father, Absynth could feel –
Arguably a trait with more sex appeal –
Though Poppa Devil sees only an Achilles’ heel.
Throughout her life, she worked hard to conceal
These foreign emotions. But when greatly suppressed,
She found herself anxious and stressed!
Passions ‘come problems when what’s wanting is took away:
Bob, Roger, Dean, Lemon, Jerry and Clay,
Bachelors listed in what order they may.
Like a baby; her boy-toys confiscated from play.
Her quick quips, jests and wit
Fall down to darkness, a junk pit,
Where they lie redundant and eventually decay.
Her once steadfast rationality wains away.
The sensible, calm, charismatic, young girl
Becomes an aggressively provocative churl.
By Celia Bate