I know what you’re thinking
I had to be slightly deranged
to watch a movie like that

but hold on, take heart
it has a 6.4 rating on the IMDB
which is decent, as you might know
and it’s not about blood and guts
or slicing and dicing
it’s a psychological thriller
about a guy whose eyes
have the right amount of crazy
to properly represent derangement

he’s a mama’s boy who goes crazy
when his mother dies

and when he’s about to be
making the beast with two backs
with a more than willing woman

his dead mother springs to life
comes back from the dead
in his deranged head
tells him the tramp is sinful
and he must kill her
which mama’s boy that he is
he dutifully does

fortunately, the movie spares you
the gore, but you know what
he’s done for mama

he has a stash of their corpses
in his house sitting at his kitchen table

I see an actress in the movie
named Miki Moore
who plays a waitress named Mary
she’s looking good back in 74
I find myself a bit taken with her
despite the fact the her of her in 74
is no longer the her of her today
if she’s even still living

in one scene her car has flat tires
flattened by the deranged son of
the dead mother to entrap her
when she finishes work

he talks her into accompanying him
to his house where he says he has
spare tires and will put them on
her car for free

she waits for him in his car outside
his house while he pretends he’s
going inside to get the tires

but he doesn’t come out
even when she beeps the horn on his car

exasperated, she gets out of his car
and starts toward his house of horrors

although I’m fully cognizant that it’s
just a movie

inside my head I’m saying no … no …
don’t go in … don’t go in ….

as if I could telepathically save her from
her predestined, godawful fate

I’m that caught up in it, and I don’t want
to see Mary suffer such an
awful end to her life

but, alas, neither I nor God
and all his angels and saints
can save her at that point
Mary doesn’t have a prayer

even with Revered Green in the
Walking in Memphis song
who usually can help
“when you haven’t got a prayer”

Mary is a doomed woman
and my imagined telepathic thoughts
cannot save her

from the ravages that await her in that hell house
so I try to remotely view and rewrite the script

to save my beloved Mary
but even that imaginary power doesn’t work

and she succumbs to the derangement of the
deranged principle in Deranged 1974

and Mary is just another corpse
thank God it’s all just a movie.

Bob Boyd

P.S. I showed this poem to a friend,
and she thought I was that caught up
in the movie. She didn’t realize
I was kidding around and exaggerating
for the sake of some fun with the poem.