MLH: Two Old RR Beth Soliloquys

2
my fantasy is the invention of a fool,
Yet, is has power, and today it came again as a fit,
and I climbed from the revery with lost time.
It was a naughty daydream months ago --
it combated anxious thoughts;
it was my entertainment,
scheduled like a boy's favorite program.
I ignored that, with repeated viewings,
the vision rended, and re-rendered,
to this iteration capable of scheduling its own showings.
Thus the fits.
But roll that film through the projector!
Where once it was a crude wish, now it is
a curse, a riddle, and a revenging ghost
appearing unannounced to work me with a proposition.
I refer to the student.  William.  The hand-raiser.
The fawner with snake-scales for a face,
the yeti with a tin-can voice.
He interrupted me with her name.
The name powered the fantasy, and let fly.
And I heard him tell me my secret.
1
Did I mention the rain?
Steam on pulleys up from the alley
crowd us as we pull focus to that open window.
Spite the rain.  She courts our looking in.
Folded into the womb of her desk
her face painted with grey fire,
and she is transformed.
Hunched before the screen,
she plays the Christmas darling knelt to the fireplace,
counting the licks and strums of flame.
Look her closer: she's lank, she's paunchy;
she's a polyp on the desk.
with filthy hair.  with yellow fingers.
And her kaleidoscope shimmering age, from childish
to something what's been out in the weather,
signs to her wasting away.
Sick.  sick.  Sick as the screen,
a cursor blinking in and out;
she makes and breaks a thousand pacts a night with that keyboard.
Now rewind.
Out the window, up,
above her building, in an angelic holding pattern.
Subtitle:
the girl in the room.
the writer in the room.
the thief in the room.
Her first book was an optioned commodity.
A paperback with stickers.
Now her wasting is the fight with book 2.
And her screen shows something afar: her former quality.
Swoop, you, swoop again, and peep, Tom, on her ruin.
She suffers a challenge, but also
a secret.  One she has avoided until now.
She's a thief.