We Wives Three

write please read and enjoy

Marriage is an institution, am I right gentlemen?

You make a vow and live half your lives to appease your wives, and what then?

Your better half takes half of your heart and life, and half and half again for your children 

Until there is not enough left to call yourself a man, it’s such a depressing notion

That we cannot have it all and enjoy it, that we must keep our promises of devotion

That love is a challenge, a partnership, and the ebb and flow of dedication 

Is strived for and beautiful, no, we are shrewd and lazy, but clever 

I propose a ring of secrecy, the perfect marriage, a happy wife and a happy life, forever 

Perhaps it begins in a den of testosterone and proving, rites of male bonding

She finds herself oddly alone, unable to fit into the grooving, her peers are not responding 

Rejecting the environment, in reaction the likeminded come together 

Joanna, Bobbie, and Charmaine, meet for women’s liberation

All they hear is talk of cleanser, vacuums and brooms, airheads infatuated, dusters with feathers

Chauvinism is rampant in the men’s association 

Whatever could be the cause, the encapsulation of the nineteen-fifties idyllic magazine maid?

Who waits on her husband with no mind of her own, subservient, cooking and cleaning in a floral print dress, 

Is there something in the water to explain the behavior the women in the neighborhood have displayed? 

Charmaine goes away with her husband for a weekend, the water, perhaps yes, 

She returns more trophy than wife, fires the help and tears down her court, despite the love of all the tennis she played

Now we’re scared, we were three, what’s happened to her? Is it going to happen to me? 

I’m going to move, go far away, I’ve just won a lucrative contract, there’s no reason to stay

I have to tell Bobbie the good news, first, but she’s not there anymore, I can’t stand it! The loss hurts!

You have to see you are human like me! Do you bleed Bobbie! Do you bleed like me? 

I cut myself open to show her, this is the last I can stand

And she only looks at me, distant and vague, parroting “Look at your hand.”

In a moment of boiled frustration, blind and exhausted with fury I snap 

I stab Bobbie, no blood, she stutters and repeats until everything she says overlaps

I do not believe this, I will not, I cannot, in horror, disgust and shock, my best friend was replaced by a fembot! 

Now she waylays her husband and demands he tell her where their children are

They are at the men’s association, he says, not far

And how could he do this, be party to this robbery of a woman’s will and her rights?

When he is the father of their two daughters, that is the worst evil of all

For they will grow, and will they be replaced on their wedding nights?

Would these broken old cowards rather rape humanity than risk a woman’s interest in them would fall?

There in the mansion, Joanna comes face to face with that very doll

Her counterpart, soulless eyes that are meant to replace the vibrance 

Of a photographer, mother, wife and real woman 

The machine strangles her to death with a nylon stocking 

Her daughters revealed to be in Charmaine’s care

She dies in front of that awful stare

Once alive, now a mere marionette, 

On the strings of violation, broken promises and control 

A woman with bright eyes, less than human, more than a pet

A walking broken vow, until death do they part, a machine, service is her role 

Down grocery aisles with her glamorous clothes and smiles, her and the wives all stroll

Picked up by her husband like a new appliance out front, placid and mundane, the very image of a depleted soul 

Taken home with the family, her husband content with his shortcomings, smiling ear to ear, achieved his goal.