After they peeled the tape from the door frame and pulled her head from the oven, the cop came at me, hat in hand, with the obvious question.
I felt far away and shrugged. I didn’t speak until the cop rhymed off the cliché about poets and passion. On the coroner’s report, there’s probably a tick box that says “death by poetic temperament”.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. As the medics tagged and bagged her, I led the cop to the sitting room where I explained:
She was a great talent. But she could only write the good stuff when she was in her dark moods. In happy moments, the best she could produce was a sing-song rhyming verse fit for lining the diaper pail. When this happened, she grew frustrated, then despondent. She would say: “I’ve lost my touch. I’ll never write a good poem again.” Then the depression would creep over her. When those dark moods roiled her brain, the poems came out fully formed: brilliant treacherous pieces that struck to the very heart. With these poems came a sense of accomplishment. She hadn’t lost her touch after all. The relief brought happiness, but the happiness brought an end to her dark poems. What followed was a succession of banal poetic turds, which in turn plunged her into despair and another series of masterworks.
“It was the roller coaster,” I said. “It was the poetic roller coaster that killed her.”