Cassandra talks back to her therapist

"But what am I to do with all this certain
knowledge of the bad times to come?"

The therapist looks around as though he thinks
Cassandra might be asking this of
Someone else, someone wiser
But no one else is there, wise or not,
So this attempt to escape her gaze fails...
He is a buck, mesmerized by her headlights.

As he was taught to do,
The therapist shifts gears, changes topics,
Conceals the agenda--

Like most everything about her,
Cassandra's questions (and her track record
Of major disasters predicted to date)
Fit no textbook diagnosis, he is lost, without a map.

So instead he tries to become
The Wizard of Oz, to regrow his magic spells,
To assert, to establish a claim, to reauthorize
The Man behind the curtain and his
Pathetically transparent pseudo-mystery.

Still, there are no answers to Cassandra's questions
And the biochemist (who waits impatiently
Just outside the therapist's warm,
Deceptively comfortable consultation room)
Just wants his own next chance to rape her mind,
With a thin pretext of helping to relieve her pain.

The consulting physicians seem to agree
If nothing else, "we" have a chance here
To make an embarassing exception
Go away, and maybe (we can only hope)
it will just go away for good.

So Cassandra, feeling that
Perhaps it was fast becoming the time
For her to head back home
If she could only find a way,
Accepts their poisons.

What is her motive in accepting?
To hasten an ending,
Or to hasten a beginning?

Given their record so far, she feels
There's at least a good chance
The poisons will work a reverse magic
And bring her home all that much faster.

And having tasted heaven for a few hours,
despite their ministrations, she sees that
End as pure beginning:
Reincarnation (if necessary) and a chance
To even the score with rapist Apollo.

Idly, she wonders, in this mundane place
Would the end appear to be a major system failure?
Were the stomach pains her husband dismissed this morning
The first signs of a fatal pancreatitis?
Or will it be liver failure?
None of these appeal, each is painful in the extreme
she knows, but at least this sort of pain
Is of fairly brief duration.

Each poison carries with it
A chance of something fatal... she just hopes
It won't be something so absurd
As that sudden, deadly rash associated
With one anti-epileptic or another.
How odd it would be to die
The waking nightmare of a dermatologist,
She thinks, and smiles, knowing doctors
As well as she does, from endless evenings
At black-tie benefits, talking cases and catastrophes.

The upside, Cassandra thinks, is at least,
If it worked out that way,
She wouldn't qualify as a suicide.

She knows too well what happens to suicides
To find that way out much of a temptation.

Eventually she laughs to realize
They never knew the answers she has known
All this time. And though the answers were "killing her"
With their rude humor, their cruel truths,
The worst of it was how
Each year she would seem to grow stronger
As those around her weakened and fell

Sometimes to pure stupidity
Sometimes to false gods, other times to
The virus or the accountant's knife.

For instance:

Her therapist, who imagined time was linear
And how his comments to that effect
Were the key that finally allowed her
To unlock one of her confusions
About their years of fruitless conversation...

Especially the way
He would say things that made no sense,
And she'd be too polite to correct him, or
To even admit she saw things differently.

Then again, he did have those keys, she thought,
In this mundane world, at least,
To take away
her freedom,
her children,
her life that was never ideal
But was never meant
To be ideal, either

And considering that Cassandra
Had died inside many years
Before she met her husband --
He who protected
But who never asked "Are you happy?" or
"Does this hurt you?"
Was it any wonder she and her therapist
Saw things so differently?
She, the walking corpse
He, the techno-optimist,
One in a long line
Of silly men
Who imagined their toys and games
Might "someday" heal the wounds
At the core of existence
And of time.

So again, Cassandra laughs at
Their efforts to reduce her pain to
A drug reaction, and a pretty diagram

That shows the chemical structure of the poison
But leaves to the imagination
What all of this might mean
Outside the walls of a chemistry lab
Or some other boy's club game room.

(Drafted 3/14/01, Revised 3/22/01)