A Still Life of the Feather of Maat and an Arrhythmic Heart

Themis has arranged her vanity,
With self-deprecation galore,
She assembles her menagerie of remembrances,
The iconography of her better years

Among the many loose Eve cigarettes
And the half opened bottles of Brandy,
Are her scales of justice and her hunting bow,
Her Tchaikovsky skull, begrimed with the fingerprints of–
The doe-eyed Sibyl Vanes that came before her

She bought it from the local auction house,
The Royal Shakespeare Company
Bought is a strong word, actually
Lady Luck was with her as she brazenly made her bid
Despite her twenty million preposition,

They, dumbfounded by the astonishment dressed–
In Schiaparelli evening wear, had offered her an irresistible offer
Rather than taking the risible bid,
They gave her the skull for free
She deemed they preferred George Frederick Cooke’s

Occipital bone far more than her little composer’s
If you happen to encounter a tall gentleman
By the name of Eugène-François Vidocq
Asking for a woman by her description,
Tell him she is a regular at the Tabard Inn

You can find her there every Tuesday night,
Every fifteenth of the month,
And every odd numbered feast day
In the remainder of her time,
You can follow her up a lonely, dimly lit street

Up the hill of a Florentine suburb,
To the Library of Babel
That's where she finds the newest taste of academia,
A new addition to her growing tower of books
Laid upon the far ends of her boudoir

Covered in dust, their fore edges yellowed
They share her same listless suspension
The pitiful purgatory of a restive goddess,
It is an existence only a few can sustain
Before Nembutal and Seconal lay their dismembered limbs–

Across her lipstick tubes and pancake makeup pans
Another debilitating night, another manic morning–
With the cold-watered wake up calls of her old friend,
Benzedrine–the salacious provocateur
With her clenching grip around her esophagus,

She has made our dear Themis an exhibitionist,
Her masochistic rituals becoming more and more apparent
To the pedestrians able to see her cyanotic arousal
From the red telephone box
To them, she is living up to her bohemian name

So, she continues her moans and groans
The light in her eyes flaring a mortal incandescence
As the parents cover their children's eyes
Quickening their pace, sage advice on the tips of all their tongues
C'est ce que c'est

She can always go home to her two-floor penthouse,
Back to her mirror, lathered with a generous layer of
Dorothy Gray’s Satura moisture cream
To ponder at every flyaway strand in her fishtail braid
And to pour more trinkets onto the crowded surface before her

A Victorian gold horseshoe earring set with cabochon garnet
A half-eaten apple,
Its skin encrusted with the smallest smidgen of vomit
A carnelian lover’s eye pendant,
With the teary stare of Catullus I printed it from memory

She will inspect all of her artifacts with the tender hand
Of a butcher on his first trimming of the day
This is the beauty Rembrandt had attempted to capture
Once the bankruptcy announcement had become too uproarious,
His efforts for religious consultation soiled

Upon his twelfth reading of the fatted calf, his appetency triggered
The lion’s roar of a restricted stomach a limiting inspiration
For the middle-aged, contending master of light and shadows
She has done what he could never do,
Constructing a magnum opus of appalling inanity
A memento mori of her eclectic past and present

She reaches for her pocket,
Aware she is missing the greatest piece to fulfilling–
Her rigorous conundrum, her sickly-sweet eyesore
From the fur-lined overcoat,
Comes a single ostrich feather

In view of her audience, she presents the terminating weapon
From the Voigtländer lens,
The hazy perfection of the plume is undeniable
She awaits to hear the applause
Once satisfied by their mirth,

She places the feather on the left side of her scale,
It descends, to the audience’s boisterous encouragement
To the heart, beating erratically, on the right scale
It has been put on record, she's a pure soul
With a cavernous procurement left in her chest,

All Themis can do is laugh as their validation–
Bombards her senses, an involuntary tear falling from her eye
She has awaited this resolution
All the critic’s reviews, always the horseplay she pegged them to be
Finally, she can rest–

Hunched over her vanity,
Her face becoming one with the set display
Her arms and legs, slackened to gravity
The director calls for an immediate cut to advertisement,
As her laugh continues to echo over the gasps