After reading this lovely thing, written by my lovely SweetBee, I somehow got out this companion piece. I’ll follow her style and put it under a Read More.
I am nothing if not a servant to you, mind, body, and soul, and so, when hands and feet are still, and the heart is the only thing I have that can bleed for you, I will do what I can- I will write.
I was a princess
I built myself a tower
fine and tall, as towers should be
I buried myself under the earth of down comforter
read into early birdsong
slept until chime of church bells
waited for my prince
.
waiting birthed madness and men were lizards
were mirrors, were storybooks, were cruelty
and I was my own prince, too
a fine man with a deep accent and broad shoulders
hands that wandered and told me no more than I was wanted
lips of plum parting against a wanting ear
breathing, lingering
waiting to tell me that I had been told to wait
and so had a purpose in my tumultuous happiness
.
in false men and fake nobility
I lived my life and built an ever after
a story I could live by
live in
until my prince found me and called me down
out of my tower, into his arms
and I found I had built a world I could no longer abandon
.
I hid under the sill and told him to leave.
.
still, he dragged me in and under with words and promises
until the cold seep of sanity left
my bones empty, clacking together in pitiful fear
I had waited for something that was slowly killing me
and in its sickly sweet asphyxiation I smelled rot
and heard truth
.
when I looked down for love
I felt in good company
and settled back in bed to wait
I had spent a lifetime dreaming of prince and stallion
when found fact was more bittersweet
.
not all heroes are princes
and not all towers are tall
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly til my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
-Randall Jarrell
Sanguine rivers float corpses of family
bursting, rigid with the actuality of their deaths
the parchment skin and skeins of earth raped with ignorance
and a child’s cruel curiosity
I think, where is my Country now?
faces of children are turned down in puddles of mud and larvae
their small hands reaching from the rock and sand
clawed in an eternal monument to fear, to suffering
where is my Country now?
freedom won is less glamorous
smiling boys in uniform hunched over blood and bones seem as empty as their eyes
the scent of nightmares and weeping wounds of maker and made all howl at the sky
where is our Country now?
“She wanted to live”
clutching sheaves of stolen paper to my strawberry breast
I bled sentimentality
no God looked upon me then
no silver idol or sun
but I was the epitome of creation and thought I knew everything
cries of outrage might have been seagulls for what they did
uncaring tide of indifference washing over my bones and rattling them like cage bars
stinging open wounds with salt spite and unfeeling froth
only drowning did I feel small and see that in my husk grew weeds
folly and fear and pettiness
and still I stained those pages with hurt
bile and organs rose and burst past paper-thin teeth and lips
and there wrote the story I could never scream
she’d wanted to live
I could no longer live for her
