Once upon a Christmas eve,
A family sat round a fire
Dad’s he’s late, he’s blaming Steve
Some cables needed to be rewired
A house he finds,
Is full of smiles,
So off he goes on his way.
Grabs baubles from the attic,
and also, grandmothers ****** investigation files
The child, eager with a sparkly blue notebook, rushes to peek inside
Crowe, it reads, Age 33, with thirty-three stabs to her side.
Oh how dramatic, Oh how fun what a wonderful thing he had brought
As seen on tv and on the big screen but never in this way before.
She stared at the words and pondered and scribed and found a new area of thought
Thinking of A Woman Dead!
But not that way of course, in the fun kind of way.
Didn’t think of the dead woman.
Now and then, the blue notebook sparkles out of the corner of my eye
I cradle the crumpled pages in my arms, the notes that I took.
The notes, cold, combined with my father’s colder memories
The good Damsel murdered by a bad ex-lover
An unfortunately common situation.
Another woman lost and alone,
Another statistic.
Oh well.
This was something I wrote during a poetry workshop about my grandma but it kind became about more than that- I wrote this a while ago