Aiyda

No one knows why Aiyda is such a bitter woman.  The creases in her face, the sunken skin around her eyes, her very tired bloodshot eyes mocks her years.  The lines around her mouth are sharp and long.  There are no curves upon her features.  Hard drawn lines that seem to have been etched since birth.  Her lips are not fleshy but emaciated like an inward pucker.  Like a mural against the wall, she sits hours on end at the pub.  A very unnatural thing for a woman, but people have forgotten that she is one.  Her figure is well hidden beneath shirt and jacket and trousers of a man’s.  She snuffs as a man, drinks and curses as one.  So no one at the pub cares that she is there every night, slouched in the same corner at the same table.  A hunched figure against the shadows of a faint candle.  Aiyda hates light.  She drinks her beer in silence, stares at her mug lost in whatever thoughts that tinker in the cobwebbed brain of hers.  On darker days she would drink and glare at the patrons, from the finely dressed landowners come by for drinks after business while in town to the fair minded country folks who regularly visit.  Aiyda is a shadow, present but no longer noticed.

Tell me what you see, little man,

with your eyes of soft gray down?

The tempestuous shudder doth quake.

For fierce-some is wrath when struck

upon the mighty breast of a woman

once scorned.

The deeps converge as spinning

orbs, of seas purging and 

churning.  Alas, little man, the time

doth come when vengeance smite

with her forked tongue.

To this I pray, garner your strength

and fly away.  No reason or mighty

oak can stand the bought of this

hurling storm. Beware and 

forewarn, the rage of a woman

once scorned.