Wild Woman Grabs a Brain

Ella of Ella's Edge, has posted a prompt about Salvador Dali at Poets United's Thursday Think Tank. We can write to any of his images, but what jumped out at me was the description of Dali's paranoic-critical method, "a surrealistic technique which involves optical illusions and multiple images". That sounds like the inside of my brain, most days, so I decided to have a little fun with it. * photo from Wikipedia*

There is a little man 
with a black moustache 
sitting on
Wild Woman's shoulder.
He mutters critical messages
in unceasing stream-of-consciousness,
as she totters gamely about,
swatting at him 
as if he were an annoying fly.

"OH! MY! GOD!
You're STOO-pid, stupid, stupid!"
he mutters, as he slaps his forehead.
"Remember the time you....?
OH! MY! GOD!
Where was your BRAIN??!!"

Wild Woman feels
the remembered embarrassment,
the sting of the moment,
all over again,
before she pulls herself together
and Moves On.
She  is smiling
but, at times, rather grimly,
in the face of this
constant barrage of memory.
Why must a life review hit upon 
all the embarrassing moments,
and skim over all the Relatively Okay
or even Resplendent ones?

She moves him over
to her other shoulder,
beside the deaf ear.
She can still hear him,
but softer.
If she gets very busy,
she can pretend he is whispering
sweet nothings into her ear,
but when things quiet,
there he is again,
sybillant, persistent, unforgiving.
"And then you.......OH! MY! GOD!...."
and she feels the chagrin again,
at having been such
a lacking individual for so long.

But then she remembers.
She was once married 
to someone like this,
and she showed him the door.
She straightens her shoulders.
"Look, kiddo, I've done the crime, yes, 
but I've also done the time,
and it is Over."
She boots him out on his ear, 
still muttering feverishly,
and readies her shoulder.
She is putting out tenders
to fill the position
with a kind, wise crone,
who will never use
the word Stupid,
who understands about Evolution,
and who will filter out the self-talk
with lovely floating images of
bunnies and deer frolicking in the forest.

Problem Solved.

The End.