"All This and More," Devil Poem by Mary Karr

Poetry Foundation:

Poem of the Day: All This and More BY MARY KARR The Devil's tour of hell did not include    a factory line where molten lead    spilled into mouths held wide, no electric drill spiraling screws into hands and feet, nor giant pliers    to lower you into simmering vats. Instead, a circle of light opened on your stuffed armchair, whose chintz orchids did not boil and change, and the Devil adjusted    your new spiked antennae almost delicately, with claws curled and lacquered black, before he spread    his leather wings to leap    into the acid-green sky. So your head became a tv hull, a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger    sloppy at the mouth and swollen at the joints    enacted your days in sinuous    slow motion, your lines delivered with a mocking sneer. Sometimes    the frame froze, reversed, began    again: the red eyes of a friend you cursed, your girl child cowered    behind the drapes, parents alive again    and puzzled by this new form. That's why you clawed your way back to this life. Mary Karr, "All This and More" from The Devil's Tour. Copyright © 1993 by Mary Karr. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Source: The Devil's Tour (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993) MARY KARR Biography  More poems by this author