Housewife Freak Squad

Mr Freak was a mistake, an ink blob, a sob job;
nothing really, in hindsight...
I answered a notice in the paper,
"Angry pack of women seeking Mr Freakazoid,
we need numbers, stragglers, on two legs,
with wooden spoons, ghostly nightgowns,
recipe books filled with flopped cakes
and black biscuits...join the crusade."
We met by moonlight, a sliver, and
grinned at each other, then laughed shortly,
and went.

A million movie pictures oozed in our
minds as we stumbled through the black,
night moaning, bumping into shards of
crumbling drapes that fell apart in our hands,
shapes that wanted us, that clawed our eyes,
yet the thing that frightened us most
was the tour of the desperate housewives,
locked in a cave with no light, we saw
our reflections in wide eyed stupors
staring at some kind of box that made
pictures we devoured with our big, dull eyes.

The caves weren't what you think --
full of plastic flowers, colour of the month,
cut out stencils, shapes of devouring youths,
plastic holidays to soulless places, blank
postcards coming back, stuck on fridges
nobody looked at. A computer was stuck
in the iceberg fridge with the internet on,
while biscuits burned in the clinical stove,
and a cake stood cooling on the bench of
plastic marble, sunk through the middle, caving in.

With our spoons we stirred the pot, the
cauldron, in our nightdresses like wraiths,
screaming like banshees, at the man who
sat cross legged with crooked teeth, looking at
pictures of himself in a daze in the papers,
gossip mags, chip packets and collectable
cards. Our Hero, it said in the headlines,
which we didn't believe for a second. Mr
Freakazoid was home but attached to nothing,
like a black balloon, bobbing and weaving
in the stale air, in love with his own reflection
on a fragile paper stand, no strings attached.

We had found him and took a group photograph,
when we got back, and swapped pictures
by the light of the full moon, we could see
our own reflections, clear eyes burning back,
smiling with black remembrance,
and saw in our glowing nightgowns,
that he wasn't there. There was a black hole
in the pic, with us blooming around it.
It was nothing, yet something, and
there was no turning back.