‘Who is the Automatic Woman? (1 & 2)’ Collective Poems by La Sirena

Who is the automatic woman? (1)

She is the domestic goddess of my dreams

She is the wave and I am the ocean

She is carved from Venus

She is not my equal

She emotes like a frightened nightingale

She is tabula rasa

She is made from the milk of human kindness

She is the doll woman with her doll dreams

She is a constellation of fetishes

She is the white queen

She is a mere mask, an ornament, a particle of sand, cast adrift in a great storm

She is a pawn

She is barely a shadow of man

She is a text to be read as you please

She is in perpetual checkmate

She cries her witch tears that flatter no one

Her reflection does not exist

She is a signified without a signifier

She doubts everything

She does not dare to dream anything but second-hand dreams

She is a mistress to patriarchy

She is a stain on the face of this earth

She is a cheap paperback novel to be discarded

She is a gift from the gods

She is the epitome of evil – a femme fatale, a siren, a new Eve – a plague to be extinguished

She is not to be trusted

She has the dry tears of all women that vampirise men’s laughter

Her mask is made out of the finest silk

She murders midnight with feminine ease

She is a masochist

She is hysterical

She is duplicitous

Her cruel games with mankind are genocidal

She is a succubus

She aspires to be a princess, but she is always only an actress

Who is the automatic woman? (2)

She is an equal

She is a hunter

She does not care for Oedipus

She inhabits my thoughts, my dreams, my waking life, 

She is revolutionary

She is crossing over, becoming who I am, who I wish to be

She is the mirror I fall asleep in

She is beyond good and evil

She is not mythical

She rejects time

Her smile is the colour of my dreams

She walks in fields of fire

She knows what she wants

She knows who she is

She is beyond signified and signifier

She inhabits the space between yes and no

She is the key 

She is closer to the sun than the moon

She cannot listen to the vile cacophony of hate-speech 

She rises above it like a great surfer

She has a form that defies form

Her x ray eyes see through you

She is a raging maenad

Her gaze turns men to stone

Her tears water the gardens where we will plant the new children

She is a forest made from the leaves of love

She is always the bridge that carries us to where we need to be

She is limitless in her vision of the future

Her arms are big enough to embrace a world that does not even care about itself

She is fork lightning caught in a velvet glove

She is real

Her cauterised sleep is the essence of magic and produces the brightest pearls

She speaks in tongues

She is the whisper I hear when I want to hear nothing

Her confidence is only sleeping

She knows the secrets of all the hidden rooms

She gives birth to herself

She is part sunrise, part teardrop, part seashell

Her wedding to the winds of old Arabia is legendary and, in this tale, she casts the greatest shadow

She is not in chronological order

The alphabet reorganises around her

Her sunshine is infectious

She does not seek the end, only the beginning of the end, and this is where she begins again, to find her new beginning

She is the last word

She is metamorphosis