Sugar Daddy Revisited

Daddy,
you have eaten all the sugar,
left me hungry and bleeding,
a blistered foot without a shoe;
you know I must kill
and sculpture you
as a marble statue,
bastard, you.

Thou wast my universe, my cosmic mistress;
if I had known thy crazed intent
to render me in alabaster, a lifeless
lump of death,
I should have begged
for one last breath.

His breathless body lies cold upon the floor,
her sugar daddy is no more.
The sweetness all gone,
her craving unsated,
now she wishes that she had waited
and made him beg.

Kim M. Russell, 15th December 2020

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: Exploring Gothic as a Literary Genre (step into the realm with me)

Sanaa is back this Tuesday to stir our muses. She gives us a background of Gothic literature, a genre which emerged as one of the eeriest forms of Dark Romanticism in the late 1700s and developed during the Romantic period in Britain. She has provided art by Stephan Mackey and J. Henry Fuseli, and poetry by Keats and Poe to illustrate the meaning of Gothic.

For today’s Poetics, Sanaa would like us to write Gothic poems and explore the question: “Which according to you are the deepest, darkest and most concealed of human emotions?”

As I have been distracted by other things this week, I have resurrected and tweaked a poem I wrote back in 2017 for the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Twitter Me a Gothic Poem, where each stanza contains 140 characters or fewer and follows these guidelines:

1st stanza is a tweet from one of a list of thirteen writers (I chose Sylvia Plath);
 2nd stanza is a reply to the first tweet by a different writer from the list (I chose Lord Byron);
3rd stanza is my commentary on the exchange between the two writers.

The stanza-tweets should be written in the chosen writers’ styles and the completed poem should read as one piece.

41 thoughts on “Sugar Daddy Revisited”

  1. This is deliciously dark, Kim 😀 and an absolutely perfect example of Gothic writing! Especially like; “The sweetness all gone,her craving unsated,now she wishes that she had waited and made him beg.” Thank you so much for writing to the prompt 💝💝

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  6. “you know I must kill
    and sculpture you
    as a marble statue,
    bastard, you.”

    Sylvia Plath, is this you?

    (and then when I read your author’s note, it made sense. Goes to show I jump too quick from the in-between of reading and commenting).

    This gave me chills, Kim. You pulled off both styles with grace and then with combining them, in a way, at the end stanza, that was remarkable. Evocatively chilling and dark. This is mesmerizing!

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  10. A remarkable and gorgeously Gothic and very Victorian Tweet storm. Tweets can go longer now, I hear. I haven’t been on Twitter since Trump was elected; too angry. Your dark amalgamation works brilliantly.

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