You told me dragons
Were not real
And then you led me
To you lair
A catacomb
So dark and deep
That sunlight couldn’t
Reach me there.

Stalactites
Like upturned tapers
Hung above my head
Like fangs
Your breath fanned out
In fiery vapors
As the gargoyles slavered
In their overhangs.

How well you hid
Your taste for blood
Your voice so soft
I felt no fear
And yet my brother
Warned me off
Beware the tune
The piper peals.

My mother wept
She knew that road
The brambles snarled
The flowers with thorns
She begged of me
To turn and run
But I was captive
I was young.

Once upon a thyme
In an herbed house
Their lived a witch
Whose ripe rampion
Was so overpowering
That the neighbors
Left bottles of febreeze
On her doorstep.

The witch didn’t care
- But
In the flat-ironed town
Of Lunch time lipo
Where you were defined
By your eating disorder
She looked like
An Omish escapee
With hips that wriggled
And ******* that jiggled
So her cell phone number
Wasn’t in anyone’s top five
-Except
For one confused neighbor
Who never made it to college
And got to experiment
Like a true Gemini.

Now imagine the witch’s surprise
When this neighbor confides
That she would love to eat
Her ripe rampion.
- Naturally
The witch agreed.
It was nice to have something
That somebody else wanted
Though it was exhausting
For the neighbor
Who munched day and night.

And if one surprise
Wasn’t enough
The witch discovered that her
Neighbor was pregnant.
Now the witch had many powers
But that wasn’t one of them.
It appeared that her neighbor
Found her husbands
Carrot patch to
Quite esculent also.

And the witch
Being a picky Virgo
With a jealous Scorpion moon
Thought that her neighbor
Should not
Have spun around the vegetable
Color wheel quite so fast
And so in a fit of temper
She stole her baby
And locked her away
In an ivory tower.

Initially everything worked out
Until the oil crisis
And then the witch couldn’t
Visit Rapunzel quite as often
As she would have liked
Not with gasoline
Being so expensive
And so Rapunzel became bored
And started chatting to
Prince charming
On her face-book wall.

The witch took all the hopeful Trojans
That the prince had left
On previous visits
And tied them together
To form a rubbery step ladder
And when she heard him shout
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel…let down your hair!"
She threw this at him…angling it
With just a little thread of hate.

Prince charming grew all shivery
And put on his worst
Austin powers "Oh behave" accent
Thinking of the delights
That awaited him
However, his shivery-ness
Soon became a full body tremor
When the witch met him
On the top rung
And he knew quick enough
This wasn’t a
Ménage à trois.

The prince spent many months
In traction
Recuperating from his fall.
Rapunzel was sent off
To boarding school.
And as for the witch…
She dropped twenty pounds
And got her own reality show
*Housewives of Salem county.

Salome*
The biblical histrionic
Herod’s bewitcher
Her charms proffered
Beneath the silk
Of seven veils.
The ****** of her belly
The rise of her *******
Makes an old mans knuckles
Long to knead her flesh.
Proselytized
Herod will give her a n y t h i n g
But John will never
Be hers.
His love is numinous
It transcends mere flesh
And so she is enraged.
And demands his head
On a silver platter.


Nothing worse
Than being told
You are loved equally
There was never a woman
Comforted by such words.
Tell your bride
On your wedding night
That you care for her
As much as you care for
Your mother
Your sister
And your aunt
And then while you skip
Into the bathroom
To search for your
Rubber accoutrements
She will be busy on the internet
Searching for your replacement
On Match.com.
And you won’t be able to call
Mother
Or Auntie
Or *****
for a hug.
Not while your ***** hangs limply
In its latex casing
It
would  
just
look
ODD.