Mrs. Jaypher

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Mrs Jaypher said it's safer
If you've lemons in your head
First to eat a pound of meat
And then to go at once to bed.

Edward Lear

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It’s this time, now, that seems to her a vacancy –
this biologically indeterminate vague state
which she can’t placate through the prospects

of the usual availing means: when life appears
to want to feed on something far beyond its
generally tractable desires and needs: no form

of sex or sleep or plate of saffron rice or playing dice
or any of that strange fastidious decorum which
sometimes proceeds from heeding Schubert

or Vermeer or Bach or Edward Lear sufficiently entice:
no human agency at all can pay the price of stalling
this dark spiral into – well, she can’t quite say

abyss, but rather that enduring kiss of existential
dusk which neither wakes her up nor makes her

comatose. Is there a drug for this? She wants a dose.

Is there a soul equivalent – a shamanistic magic

cure that might perform the right transforming

trick? She wants one or the other: quick.

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