Marquis de Sade (Curse the Womb)

        "Let the games begin..."

Looming against the blank curtain,
soft, unconscious moaning erupts.
Within my ribcage, a ticking, tick tick,
corrupts.

        "Now you love and hate your mother, she's bound
        and out for you, you've closed your heart to her,
        that's not something good little girls
        do"

This dead life and living death, corroded with
stains of breath; gurgling bile and
Oedipelian myth manifests.
Wasteland.

        "Attached to your cold, beating heart, there is a key. To your left
        a dazzling razor smiles: will you give the key to your heart
        to save mother's life, or tear out the womb which you
        revile?"

Shivering, sweating blood and tears, the
culmination of my worst fears, trading or
executing my own life for theirs: why family?
Torn.

        "Between Mother's hips, there is also a key
        that will end her pain and your misery, she will die
        and you will live, but is a second birth really hers to
        give?"

The first birth was hers alone, and I remember her
gift of life: why can't I pay back in my own blood
the dreams she sacrificed?

        "You have sixty seconds to choose: do it, or else
        the arsenic and nutmeg fluid, will course
        through her veins, your own mother you will have
        slain."

Glancing again at the razor, I hastily scraped
deep into the left of my chest for the key to
excavate.

My own life gathered in puddles, as I lurched
my offering to her: a gore-caked hand that
trembled,

as I exhaustedly crawled to the door. The key slipped
through wet red fingers-- an ominous buzzer growled; My
vision

blurred, hazing into oblivion, the rasping curtain
became a dirty shroud, as the clattering key was lost- a
voice:

      "Sixty seconds are up, you and mother will have
      both died today: she loved you more than you hated her,
      and she gave herself up for you, that your life you would not have
      to pay..."