Mary Shelley
       

You are the furthest thing
from a Pre-Raphaelite painting
I know. Your middle man
a monster, you wake at midnight,
candles ablaze, remembering
the last line you wrote, then
the line that came before.
Your heathen love a creature
standing eight feet tall:
jaundiced skin, steel
piping through his neck.
You spent your life beside
rivers with impossible names—
Thames, Serpentine.
You invented the inventor.
You escaped debtor's prison.
Suicide is not an option anymore.

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Copyright © 2018 Virginia Konchan All rights reserved
from The End of Spectacle
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission