Alison Ross- A Poem

Empathy for the devil 

There is sympathy and there is empathy and then there is the hole inside my head. The devil told me he'd take a look at it, but he doesn't do house calls and anyway, my kitchen is a mess. So I rang the doctor instead, and he prescribed a large dose of apathy, and plenty of restless sleep. When the devil called asking me to a dinner party at midnight in the garden of pseudo-evil, I yawned and fell back into my Baudelaire nightmare, where the flowers smell like narcissism and the wine tastes like the aftermath of excessive calculation. 

And besides, I never really liked solving equations, which is maybe why I have this hole inside my head. 

Author bio: 

Clockwise Cat publisher and editor Alison Ross has been published here, there, elsewhere and nowhere. She experienced rave-levels of ecstasy when she found out she was shortlisted for the 2014 Erbacce Prize among 20 others, down from 5,000 entries. She was also giddily bemused when was nominated for the Best of the Net a few years back, though she lost out to savvier scribes. Alison's chapbook, Clockwise Cats, released by the venerable Fowlpox Press, will subvert your dissonant dystopia into a euphonious utopia of Zen-Surrealist bliss.