Poetry, October 2020. Halloween Challenge #3

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You know,

               For all of the infamy bestowed to me,

               The horror I’ve accredited,

               And the malice that’s been bred to follow–

               For all the criticism, critique of my legacy 

               Meant to strip me apart, vultures at their feast,

               As they make me the inhuman one, I wonder,

               Has anyone  stopped to think –

                    ‘Oh, how frigid the rain must be in London!

                    How bitterly it must have raged upon his skin, searing bare wrists,

                                                Freezing knuckles mid-incision, sullying the skillfulness of any such work?’

Do they wonder how thin the Ripper’s coat might have been,

               And how death might have seized him, too, through a pauper’s threadbare armor?

You know,

               Those filthy, wet alleyways were really no safer for me than them.

                              For Mary and the vermin skittering on Buck’s Row.

                                      For Annie in the sour moss of Hanbury.

                                              Elizabeth, so taken with my ‘shabby-genteel’ appearance.

                                                         Catherine, another ghost of Mitre Square, littered amongst the cigarettes.

And Mary, again, taken so apart that I may have found the very pieces    

                                                                         

 Of myself.