How dare he compare
me to an agate stone
how crass his dash
of trilling speech

I am the only Lady of Love
mistress of your fears and wants
harbinger of woes and splendorous joy

I whisper in your ears, tickle your fancies
excite, provoke, enrage, enlarge, engorge, elate
gallop through each still and breathless night

My whips are strands of barbed eglantine
my nails spurs of sharp blackthorn
with which I fasten souls to unrequited forlorn
painful passions that decay and burn, fester and smother

I fill thoughts with slithering writhing worms
that eat into flesh and all that is delight
then, with a careless felicitous whim
pour bliss onto agonies, soothe tremors with gaiety
caress all alarm, fears and dread away

I am the acting of a hideous thing
a dreadful piece, I fill you with heavy cold dread
a pretty piece, I litter your mind with rose scent and daisies

Player of a thousand twangling instruments
soothsayer of sublime disasters
such as both dreams nightmares are made on

I am Mab

[Kim Whysall-Hammond is an exiled Londoner who now lives close to where Wayland has his Smithy. She has worked in Climate Research and in Telecommunications. A late comer to publishing poems, her poetry has appeared in several magazines, including Andromeda Spaceways, Eternal Haunted Summer, Fantasy Magazine, Frozen Wavelets, Kaleidotrope, On Spec, Star*Line, The Future Fire, and Utopia SF. She also has poems in anthologies from Wild Pressed Books, Milk and Cake Press, Palewell Press and Brigids Gate Press.]