A Letter to My Daughter as a Seventies Slasher

 

To my final girl, tilted towards a telephone,

throwing interrogatives into a refrigerator,

apologising in an abattoir, shunning a chaperone,

batting lashes at a billhook, berating a carburater.

 

As regards a sepia Pierrot, geckoid greasepaint,

jollily attired, I hereby itemise the number of stairs

of false direction, and duly italicize the faint

essence, cognate with matchsticks, that he wears.

 

I do this, I realise, in service of my own contrition,

because I am the scriptwriter for this Punchinello’s

performance. All of his chainsaw transgressions,

his rotary atrocities. I pen every pained libretto.

 

I urge you shed my damselled trope and demur

the appropriative machete, the appropriate response,

without any corn-syrup requirement to endure

the appellation that opens my correspondence.

 

Here a pale of pig-blood jouissance, there adrenaline

to take a pitchfork to all virginal or promiscuous

requirements. Freely avail yourself of liquid nitrogen

to glaciate any ancillary self-centredness.

 

With respect to a beboilersuited psychiatric

escapee, dead eyes in a Shatner-Noh, take receipt

of slashed truck-tires in a guardianless district

from the silhouette of your father as you retreat.

 

These pathetic gifts I will proffer until day breaks

over my farmyard or when my obscene cutlery falls.

A home while I have breath. A place by an endless lake.

Yours, a house coming from inside the call.