Tin Man's Deceit

Rising sun wipes out the stars,
spilling light on Dorothy’s scars,
self-inflicted on her skin,
each wound a cry for Auntie Em.
At dawn, she wakes where she passed out.
Dirt and grass invade her mouth.
Defeated by his traitorous chrome,
“No place like home,” she moans,
prone, face-down on Toto’s grave,
far from Kansas’s amber waves.

Silence answers Dorothy’s call.
The ruby slippers don’t work at all.
Childhood enchantment has gone stale
in this fucked up fairytale.
Bitterness has made her numb,
squatting in a worn-down slum
just outside her field of dreams,
where poppies mix with her bloodstream
and the lollipop ale, delivered each day,
helps wash her fears away.

Poppy flowers dull her pain, but
they don’t survive on sun and rain.
They drink tears, which Dorothy cries,
thinking of Lion’s cold, dead eyes,
and the winged monkeys circling, cackling
as Lion bled out, fire crackling,
and the smell of Scarecrow’s body burning,
arms outstretched and straw face yearning,
Dorothy’s innocence stripped away
by the death of her friends that day.

Tin Man, vacant of emotion,
had come upon the murderous notion
that serving the witch would bring more power
than wasting time with an idiot and coward.
The witch gave what the wizard could not,
a beating heart, full of venom and rot.
The organ thumped in his silver chest,
and the metal man was soon possessed.
He winked at the trio with nowhere to run
and laughed as the witch had her wicked fun.

Ambushed in Oz, the wiz long dead
(monkeys had eaten all but his head),
the lion had stuttered, “P-p-please! St-st-stop!”
furry skull split by the axe’s chop.
And sometimes Dorothy could still smell
the ash and smoke of Scarecrow’s hell,
her unwashed pigtails filled with soot,
socks stained red as her slippered foot.
Emerald City looked dismal these days,
enveloped in a thick jade haze.

And why had they let Dorothy live?
Because she had so much to give
as entertainment in a crystal ball.
The witch, enrapt, watches her downfall,
reciting spells to replenish the supply
of poppy flowers to keep her high.
Do they watch, Dorothy wonders,
as she degrades herself and blunders
through dirty deeds with munchkin men
that would appall poor Auntie Em?

Under a blue dress, her body’s for sale.
She satisfies munchkins for lollipop ale,
haunted by memories of Lion’s reaching paws
in this wonderful world of Oz.
“Someday,” she tells herself, “I’ll go home.
I just need to leave these damn poppies alone
and get my head straight, but first,
a run through the field, one last burst
of relief, of sweet, enveloping dreams
to deafen the echo of dying screams.”

She breathes deep the flowers, closes her eyes.
Somewhere over the rainbow she flies,
far above the yellow brick road,
where a munchkin travels, carrying a load
of ale for the trapped girl, once so kind
who will do anything, now, to escape her own mind.
Glinda’s light is gone, turned to a black hole
forever spinning in Dorothy’s soul
to the sound of wicked monkey applause
in the merry old Land of Oz.