THE HONEST TRUTH - A SECRET IN THE HOUSE April Month of Poetry

The poem you are about to read is true. And I am not the first to discuss the information. The New Yorker, October 21, 2013 Issue  Books - Briefly Noted gives a short review of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, by Helen Fielding. Faced with a new life raising two children, the book opens with the children having head lice. I will have to read it and compare it to my experience.

Which is a major panic. The ordeal of buying every lice killing product for the scalp and armloads of spray for every surface anyone may have touched in the house. And bagging up any pillow, comforter, hat, stuffed animal, couch cushion into outdoor bags for smotherification, tossed into the garage. Not to be opened for a month or two. (?) The constant inspection. Switching products. Sleeping under fumigated bedding. It can drive a body mad.

I give you my honest rendition.

A SECRET IN THE HOUSE

Alas, my beautiful hair

Did not survive a menacing snare.

No more trips to the chic salon,

I bought new “hair” and pulled it on.

This lack of locks was not from stress or disease.

I had a secret in my house

-a louse who wouldn’t leave.

Lucky me, the patient survived.

But after days of living in the waiting room

I discovered my “guest” in glorious bloom.

Despite my constant perusal

This thing was not easily removable.

Lathered in chemical foams with label warnings

Of damage to my brain,

A fortune in prescriptions washed down the drain.

After months of hidden despair I gave up my medicated hair.

Fresh and free and bald as a baby,

No longer crazy over a bug too small to see

Without good light and scrutiny.

Society thinks “nice” people do not have lice

But no one is immune.

I survived the menacing snare.

All it cost me was my hair.

Amy Holt Taylor @2011