It started with the word,
dragon,
and its synonym:
dad,
That man who started fires with the things that he said.
He didn’t breathe fire, he used words instead.
They were never for me because I was
Good.
Good, in definition.
In other words, I was
Quiet.
They were never for me because I was quiet.
And I was familiar with them -- the dragons.
I had a secret weapon, a word,
And the word was a
Shield,
And the shield’s name was
Indifference,
To the fire, the burning fire,
To the words.
From behind his teeth, below blood-shot eyes they came,
BIG words which rested on my head like a weight,
LOUD words that drowned out every other sound,
They were hot to the touch, BURNED like a brand,
Coloring my sight RED with the CURSES between syllables,
A SLEDGEHAMMER to the wall around my idealistic world.
I watched it crumble…
There was another word,
Sister:
Who only shared half of my blood.
The half-sister,
The one who never did say the right things.
A warrior
who never wore a shield, only purple,
Purple:
The color of royalty,
The color of HER
Of her BRUISES after battle,
From the WORDS and the FISTS and the BLOWS that he gave.
I wanted bruises too! I wanted to be    
BRAVE…
But my words were so quiet,
and I was scared of the dragon….
Black,
the color of a fortress,
a world in a word,
And a synonym:
my closet.
The silence was a friendly phantom,
Which stroked my scarlet hot cheeks,
lifting me into the delicate plumes of its dark embrace.
out of the world of an eight-year-old,
the coward.
Confused, scared, angry, I WAS A CHILD!
But I was a child with very grown-up thoughts.
Grown-up, a word,
And its synonym: serious.
White
was the color in my nightmares.
Filled with veils, bouquets, and pearly smiles
The haunting ivory of a wedding dress,
And its synonym:
a prison.
The couple would smile and say, “I love you.”
But that word,
Love,
Had a synonym:
Obligation,
And its color was green,
The color of the dragon’s face when it looked at other women.
And when long the years past, the coward child became serious,
I became serious, a word,
and its synonym, grown up.
I still carry my shield
For whenever I see
Dragons,
dragons, a word,
and its synonym:  

MEN.

'Neath a cover of black faux leather
bursting with half-written verses
Lie coffee stains, old bird feathers
and lines of illegible cursive
the bitterness of heartbreak
on lines by brine besmeared
of victories and of mistakes
and thresholds I have cleared
This is my skeleton key
a glance into thoughts long passed,
for my broken memory
I hold a looking glass.

There lived an old woman
In a tumbled old cottage
In the midst of the silent wood.
She kept figurines
And the most peculiar things
In her little old cottage in the wood.

Her vases were chipped
Her tapestries ripped
And her silverware bent like her back,
But beautiful was she
And her beloved oddities
In that little old cottage in the wood.