A portrait of Medusa

Who put a spliff between my lips
and smudged-in shadow round my eyes

who plucked my eyebrows
— catch that whiff of smouldering recompense —

who ripped the canvas     as he she or it
scratched-out my head of snakes

and scumbled-in     more fitting for a child
Alice-blue     a length of velvet ribbon

tied into a bow     around a fall of hair
that spells out innocence?

It wasn’t Michelangelo