As children
We who wore tights to school
   were taught
to wok in high heels
with a book on our heads


to never wear mascara
on our bottom lashes

                        red lipstick = harlot
            red nails = *****
            wearing jewelry = sinful


                       to be proper
                       to mind our manners


           the three monkeys mantra



                      



So we still
Go downtown in our good clothes            
Wearing high heels carrying a matching bag

We have expensive taste
Reputations to uphold

fast cars
      +
          faster boys
      =
           red lipstick
red nails
bodies bejeweled



We learned
All of that                                      Indoctrination
was nonsense









Oh! The high heels of heartache!
How those cruel shoes constrained us

ｐｌｅａｓｕｒｅ
                ａｓ  
ｐａｉｎ

he told his partners

unwitting souls
commanded by his
physical
beauty

strong
self assured
manner

unwillingness 2 accept
anything but compliance
acquiescence

compelling
in his self assurance
many were led into his lair
gullible

some to escape
never the being they’d been

some
attempting
to flee
flogged into further submission
and eternal darkness

pleasure as pain
he told them

the once innocents





© 2017
rf

Oh cat,
I've never witnessed innocence
Before, how you howl to protect
Your kittens,

How scary
Must my tallness frighten
You, all curled around
Your young.

And the breezes
cold, threatening death
To such beauty unfolding
how, life is told

I want to think,
In the eyes of a mother
teats swolled and young
depending so
Much upon

Those fierce eyes tell
Me so, wild as the winds cold
You have soul
chilled by aloneness
You are touched now.

So brave me this glance,
Mom. I chance to
Make a life somehow
As well as you have
And be true to it.

To the death

My eyes have always been open
Open to where I am
Open to who I am with
Open to the flows of the world,
Flows that I could never fully comprehend,
The complexities dance in front of my eyes
Mirrored in my mind
Filling it with swirling thoughts;
Never fully sunken in, and yet seen
Unseeingly.

Flows that I cannot comprehend
Continue to surround me
No matter how many flows etch into my flesh
Eyes open, mind overflowing.

The love that stares me in the face
Seen
Unfamiliarly familiar
Unseeingly
Irreplicable in my heart
Swirls endlessly in my thoughts
In and out of consciousness
It was never etched into my flesh.

Mused once on serendipity deciding
The left was more right than the other way
Did not make such a decision wildly
Without many thoughts
And deliberations
Deliberately
She took months of imposing on friends and acquaintances asking all
Kinds of personal questions not
Accepting their nods for answers she needed quotations , she pestered
And poked spoke in rhymes and leading modes trying to find the one
truth by being intrusive enough to see through them. Was she pre-ordained for this mission of magnificence at being ignorant to find truth or was that the way the mainstream of humans are, or was she bounding new limits founding an orthodox or crossing some limit.  See Herfiffity was once younger still young but above the legal age at the minute she gave out her ****** mind to the right then thought right about it and left.
And how she wept.

sitting
                     in the quagmire of her self contempt
                     a flame ignites beneath
                     the blackened caldron


like
                      a frog
                      set to cook in a *** of tepid water

she
                      was clueless
                      she was being devoured
                      from the inside out