ManicDDaily

Male Ego

Her mother used to tell her, when she was young,
about the male ego.

The girl imagined it, from her mother’s words–
fragile,delicate–as a diaphanous coddled egg
that shimmered just above
men’s foreheads.

Her mother admitted that she herself
was not good with male egos.
This, she would sometimes sigh,
was a reason she had had to work
so hard in her life.

But the girl was different from her, the mother said–
her nose was small, and she had, 
what the mother called,
”little doll legs,” and, instead of a certain defensive
orneriness (the defect of the mom), she exhibited,
consistently, an intense desire to please.  

The girl liked her nose well enough, but every time
her mother spoke of her little doll legs,
something cracked.

She did not really want a coddled egg hovering
over her head, and yet she would not have
minded, she thought, some edge of delicate
shimmer.

Agh!  (I really have edited it some more now since first posting.)

The above is my poem (somewhat tortured and edited again since first posting) for Tess Kincaid’s The Mag (112) and also my 8th poem in eight days for the 8th day of National Poetry Month.   The picture is my take on the pic by Djajakarta, posted by Tess as a prompt.

If you are interested in a comic analysis of noses, check out my very silly, but I think fun, novel called Nose Dive.