Saturday 7 June 2014

Crooked

The following is an observation of the time I wore the Milhaukee Brace...a brace to correct the curvature of scoliosis.



Crooked



Her back was as crooked as the leaning tower of Pizza. Most folks regarded her as a foul creature.  To them she was Quasimodo’s Sister.  They would poke fun of her as she walked through the streets of town.  She was encased inside an ivory cage with metal rods poking through her thread-bare clothes up to her chin. What’s worse, her neck was caught in a most embarrassing contraption which protruded from the metal rods within her formidable cage.  She was the personification of Frankenstein’s monster.  Yet she was only a girl....a terrified, lonely little girl who lived with this atrocious deformity. 

Since the age of eleven she was diagnosed with scoliosis...a formidable bone deformity.  Her orthopaedic doctor recommended she have an operation, spinal fusion he called it.  But her mother didn’t have the heart to have her daughter undergo such a risky operation.  She couldn’t bear the thought of her little girl under the surgeon’s knife.  There was a second option:  The Milwaukee brace.  The child wore that hideous apparatus from the tender age of eleven until the age of sixteen.

© Mary Aris. All rights reserved

The Possession of La Sue Joy

The Possession of La Sue Joy

It started with a burning fever,
Deep within the recesses of my soul...
What began as a flame turned to fire
Scarlet and hot like a scourging fireball.

Spreading like a cancer that cell by cell...
Destroyed every fibre of my being
Till nothing was left but a hollow shell;
This thing devoured my soul; I’m bleeding!

My throat is parched like a drought
I reach to satisfy and quench my thirst
But my glass lies half empty; without a doubt
Someone has drunk from my cup first.

I look in the mirror and see a monster
Staring back at me with bulging eyes so mean;
I see a girl that I once knew and roar with anger
Why did she steal my crown, this beauty queen?

Now I am left rotting like a cadaver
Lying half naked in the streets of envy and desire!

  © Mary Aris. All rights reserved