X is for Xena stabbed in the eyelids

X is for Xena stabbed in the eyelids
04/27/2008 - National Poetry Month post #32, part of The Unlucky Twenty-Six

From the day she turned nine, young Xena decided
she didn't like looking so normal and sweet.
She thought all her schoolmates were being misguided
and shouldn't be living a life incomplete.

Her big sister's friends had tattoos and earrings
and one had a mohawk all spiky and tall,
but Xena adored her long hair and feared shearings
and up until then had looked just like a doll.

She'd worn dresses and skirts and blouses with ruffles
and all kinds of feminine, girly-girl things,
and she ate little bon-bons and chocolaty truffles
and did up her hair with ribbons and rings.

But when she turned nine, her attitude changed,
and the frilly, bourgoise things she now did abhor.
Her parents and friends thought she'd gone quite deranged
for she stopped liking things she used to adore.

Instead, she began to wear black leather belts
with big, metal studs and even some spikes
and she started some scarring and showed up with welts
while her friends put on helmets and rode off on bikes.

She found in the alley behind the mechanic
a guy who would do her tattoos on the cheap,
and young Xena got piercings without any panic
and though they hurt lots, she said nary a peep.

She pierced both her ears and her belly button
and also some other less visible parts.
For tattoos and piercings she turned quite a glutton;
the metal within her had gone off the charts.

She dropped sewing class and also home ec;
how many piercings she had, nobody knew.
Eyebrows and shoulders, the back of her neck,
her ankles and eyelids and bottom lip, too.

One day on the platform at Marrow Moor Station
while waiting with friends for the subway to come,
she jumped to the tracks just for some titillation
which turned out to be quite remarkably dumb.

Though the train was not due to arrive for some time,
young Xena forgot one tiny detail
amid all the trash and the dirt and the grime
lurked the powerful, deadly, electric third rail.

Her body was so full of metal debris
that it acted just like a wee lighting rod,
and the arc that zapped out from the rail to her knee
cooked her all the way through like a small piece of cod.

One of my writing goals for 2008 is to write at least one light verse or poem every week in addition to my haiku wednesday and fiction friday posts. I will try to do this on Mondays.