Mademoiselle Esmeralda LaPitch

top drawing is the current preferred one, bottom kaleidogram which Facebook informs me got posted a year ago today is what gave whatever writes the poem over here the idea for it. but they both, dare I suggest, have something to recommend them for their task.  Attitood,  as one likes to call it.

Uncle Fran and Aunt Dan

(no one’s sure who is which)
tend to over-protect (says Luanne,

hired hand) Mademoiselle Esmeralda LaPitch.

. 

Esmeralda has lodged with them ever since

mater Clotilde said she just couldn't cope
with Ez-Mel, who Clotilde finds egregiously

plain and demonstrably more than a bit of a dope. 

. 

Clotilde was sufficiently vexed that she

no longer slept; rage had burned her eyes dry.

While Ex-Mel slept fine, mater Clo's crooked spine
crumpled further atwist at the sight of the girl who would lie

. 

so complacently snug in her bed (that dreary cliché of a bug 

in a rug!), as the dull little brain like a drip down a drain

of her daughter dreamed stupidly on.

‘I could slaughter her,' Clo hissed, as steam of the pain

.

of the lust to annihilate soon began feeling too great to resist,

and even Clotilde knew that this wouldn't do.

(She'd surely get caught.) So she’d taken the only recourse

she could take (why only? we haven't a clue):

. 

she flew overnight to Peru. We’ve forgotten why Uncle

and Aunt Fran and Dan are so driven to shelter their ‘niece’
(though she isn't a niece, nor related at all): 

Fran and Dan had decided that this seemed the least 

. 

they could do for that little LaPitch of a lass

who, when asked when her mom left if mom left a gap, she

replies, though she isn't sure why, "'Bet your ass!"

If she said any more she is sure she'd get sappy.

. 

So maybe this ending is not not unhappy.

Or ought we to say it is not not not happy?

Negatives double and triple so easily!

Perhaps these intend that the ending end queasily.

.



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