Day Five, Poem #5 - The Evil Twin

The Evil Twin
NaPoWriMo #5– make your poetry personal

From that moment in the late summer sun
when Louise chided and goaded me to swing higher
and higher on the rope swing and then
let go
I knew that she and I were wary acquaintances
at best
or tied with iron chains to each other like anchors
at worst.

She would take me by the hand and tease leggy spiders
in thick webs.
She’d take my favorite toys and wander alone through the
moonlit fields.
Louise taunted dogs, chased cows, stole bicycles, threw pebbles
at passing cars.

When she was older, she told me about
dangerous boys.
Boys with fast cars, boys with long hair and thousand-mile stares.
Louise walked down alleys at midnight, snuck in the back doors of bars,
ran away to join the carnies and got tattoos over every inch of her body
except her face.

Louise walks tightropes over city blocks.
She parachutes off of bridges on windy days.
She swigs from passing bottles around fires of cold mining camps
in European towns no one has ever heard of.
She is pushed from hot air balloons by spurned lovers
but lives
unbroken,
unscarred,
unscathed.

One of these days when we are both old and deaf,
parked helplessly on someone’s veranda,
she will take out a pen
and a sheaf of unlined writing paper and
scribe in length what it
has been like all these years,
saddled with her evil twin.

From the poem prompt to personify your poetry and give it personality.