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I don’t know what first drew
me to Toxic Girl,
like a moth to a flame,
like a male black widow spider to his mate.
Was it her lethal good looks?
The supple hunch of her back?
The napalm of her neck?
Her St. Valentine’s Day mascara?
Her button-down cholera?
My friends told me she was wrong for me.
I had to choose between Toxic Girl and them.
We moved to a different neighbourhood
where I got a job at the consulate.
Kids teased her, calling her a witch and a circus freak.
What did they know? They were only kids!
Then one day, while Toxic Girl and I were
walking around the block, again,
being hounded by snot-nosed adolescents,
she got pricked by a prickly tree,
and her festering, Notre-Dame-bell-ringing,
grotesquely-humanoid form burst.
Kids grabbed pieces of "The Pus Lady" off the street.
I normalized relations between my foot and
their asses, and chased them away with the
same misshapen branch that was her undoing!
I cried over the pus-filled pool that once was her,
the syrup that was my sugar. I watched as the
rest of Toxic Girl emptied into the storm drain.
I held the mess that was her dress and vowed
I would never love another like her!
That night I burned the branch that took my baby from me.
The wicked branch that changed my life forever.
That murderous branch!
I’ve decided to become a logger.
I think it’s what Toxic Girl would have wanted.
by David Clink
from: The Surly Blondes of Earth, ©2002
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