Andrea, here’s the update

Snow-white has run off with Happy after the Charming Prince to jail he went for kissing the girl without consent.

Wicked stepmother has cleared her name. The apple was a honey crisp, ate it herself, she couldn’t resist.
  
They rushed her to the ER. Pumped her stomach, sent her home in an Uber car.

Andrea Remember

how we rode our bicycles to the park on warm summer days. Mine a dull shade of green, clunky with fat tires. I think my father paid five dollars for it. You with a sleeker younger model. Didn’t matter. We were young, hopeful and complete with the moment.

how long has it been since we walked those hollowed high school halls, poofed hair, poofed pride, poofed egos? We thought we were something back then. The age of innocence, incense, and nonsense.

remember how we dutifully attended religious instruction every Thursday afternoon at Corpus Christi Church. Funny how some things stay with you and some things are on the fence.

remember the crowded lunchroom where our little clique met regularly at 11. I ate ice cream sandwiches every single day. I was size 9, you maybe no size at all, maybe zero or four.

remember the guy on the radio would say “especially you size nine.” No way would he get away with that today.  

you were always impeccably dressed.  A fashionista before anyone had ever heard the word. I especially remember that soft orange sweater you wore that looked so adorable on you.

Andrea Remember

all the boys we loved and left.

all the boys who left and broke our hearts. I remember you crying in the backseat of the car.

will we ever forget?

I remember the day you told me he had gotten her pregnant and they were getting married. Years later I met his son and he looked so much like him. Years later I met him, but it wasn’t the same.

we made a great team, you and me. You outgoing, gregarious and fun. Me quiet and shy. You were Penn and I was Teller. You always led the way and I always followed. I perhaps wanted to be you and you perhaps wanted to be me.

I almost didn’t pick up the day you called, not because I didn’t still love you. But a lifetime has happened since. How was I to fill you in, where was I to begin?

like a treasured yet comfortable keepsake, I had tucked you away. Distant memories flashed a do not disturb sign in my unsettled mind.

a snapshot, you were frozen frames in the reel of life. Young, long black hair flowing, petite and always from frame to frame in perpetual motion.

you often returned to me in dreams like the words to some lost but once favorite song.

we believed in fairytales then. We believed in love stories and happy endings. We believed we’d find our Prince Charming one day and live happily ever after.

perhaps my hesitation was a refusal to accept life’s changing seasons. You belonged to the spring not winter, the past not the future. Perhaps something more. Perhaps I knew in a split second my life would be changed forever.

perhaps I knew I would need to tell you how fairytales don’t always come true and you would need to tell me too.

I am an artist
I am not
Painting with oils and with words
Painting arranging itself on a blank canvas
Words stumble and fall into calligraphed stanzas
I am only an artist when I am not
Words, dare I say my
If I’m lucky and don’t try
Favorite colors falling from a rainbow sky.

Seasons are quickening
Redshifting streaking  an ebony sky
Hurling meteoric handballs
Through the space of no time
Someone’s shuffling the deck of days
Reading the hearts and spades as they play
One turning into the other
The other turning into one
Diamond heart of antiquity
Crisp-clear seeds piercing crystal clouds
Torrents of thinking tears falling
Heaven's warehouse of available thought
Flooding the worn weary  
Seeking shelter
From themselves
Speeding down the highway of no time
Chasing summer
Chasing spring
Summer’s silence shouts from an empty rooftop
You’re an orphan now
‘How can this be’
You cry out
An echo reverberates
‘What was that you said’
Old man winter slugs through
The showy season heavy
Looking for the one that got away.
One doesn’t necessarily follow the other
Measured thought collapses onto itself
He doesn’t know it
And is okay
It’s warp speed
And a slow grind
At the same time
Summer was wrong
You’re destiny’s child.

Didn’t have time to pack a suitcase
News of your arrival
For those supposedly
Seeking  your survival
Unexpectedly came too soon
They called ‘code blue’
‘code blue’
Usurpers of free will
Moving in for the mourning ****
How dare you
How dare you.

What conformity belies the truth of your aggression?
What sadistic urges your imperious suppression?
Monsters in blue
What did I do to you?
How dare you
How dare you

Five came guns blazing
While I sat happily sun gazing
They threw you into the backseat of their cruiser
Shackled and tackled
And black and blue
Bam, bam, bam mame
Now do you understand
Monsters in blue
What did I do to you?
How dare you
How dare you

I don’t play by your rules
Because you’re fools

It was early spring
Barely a mist
Pisces you old daydreamer
They labeled you a fall risk
Isn’t it the season of renewal?
Was there something that I missed?
A sledgehammer to crack a nut
Sometimes I get really, really ******.
If it’s a broken tread
So be it.

An orange bracelet
Separates us from them.
The walking condemned
Who march to their own beat
Hey, monsters in blue
Mad as a hatter
Are you
I’m pointing the finger at you

My loathing I can hardly contain
You think me insane
My clarity is so beyond your ability to see
I don’t play by your rules
Because you’re all fools
Your conformity is a deformity in this crazy world
Excuse me if I’m barking mad
And a trifle sad
This baptism by fire
Stirred my ire
You asked no questions, no need
Never asked how I plead
You took his word, unquestionably
Would you have done the same
If he were a she?

By just what authority
Do you throw out democracy?
Ball and chain
Is the name of your game
Monsters in blue
What did I do to you..

My anger quite soothing
Someone brings me a smoothie

Didn’t want to end on a sour note
But if I ever get my hands on your throat
I might squeeze
So, I'm down on my knees
Praying for deliverance
From you
Monster in blue.

Funny how the feeling comes and goes
Could it be, you’ll stop haunting me soon
You know some days I think just like a loon
But, in the end, give me one good reason
To stay,  
The hanged man
Broke loose from his noose
The castles in peril
The queens mean
And the subject sterile
So,
Down dog down,
Don’t make me scream and holler
I swear I won’t put you in a collar
And walk you around like a puppy dog.
I only wanted to keep you close to me
Hopelessly, I see for wanting a dialogue

Do one and one make two?
Am I still a friend to you?
If not, please tell me what I did or didn’t do
Because I was always trying to be a friend to you
Was I overbearing in my caring?
Did I say too much or not enough?
I know you hated my gushing and mushing and my leaning on you
But you know, if truth be told
I know you don’t really care
It’s true
If I said you act like this because you don’t really care
You tell me it’s not true
But breakthrough, it is true
You don’t really care for much.
It’s not really a lack of sufficiency
But it could be
More like a chosen, frozen stringency contingency
**** it, don’t we see in everyone else
What we don’t see in ourselves.
Because you know the highs and lows
Is that why the feeling comes and goes
It could be true of me as well

Why do I have to follow protocol?
It’s your call, you know
Slayer of untruth
Wreaker  of havoc
Assassin unfastened
I’m knee deep in denial
The jury has declared a mistrial
Don’t know what’s ahead
Maybe my deathbed
No magical carpet ride, try instead
Ossified, petrified, vilified
Rider of the dark night
Looking for a guiding light
Frozen, chosen neophyte
On the backside of truth
Cockeyed seeker of
A fountain of youth
Found it in a bottle of vermouth
It was short-lived
Started to fizz
That is
What I’m trying to say
Do you understand now
If you do, please tell me
There’s nothing I can do
I’m me and you’re you
If you understand
If you do, please tell me
Do one and one make two
Or is it a roadmap
Am I a doormat?
Have I
Forsaken myself
For the love of a lover
Or is it just a cover
For not liking me.

Artists are always trying to configure the landscape with invisible ink. So, it seems. The kind you can't see at first (a thought, a wish, a desire)  and with an incredible thirst for life. Maybe survival may be because they're afraid, maybe afraid to be swallowed up by some demonic invisible force. No filter to tune out all the little things you see.  You're fed up with all the analysis. You need to purge. Uh- such an ugly word. Well, I guess that’s one way to put it. Try purify, justify, express, clean up, cleanse. remove, sanitize, vent, erase. On and on.  Morph it, whatever it may be, into some form of art. Some of it splatters, some of it matters, some of it doesn’t.  Not art for art's sake. Too difficult. Too contrived. Too much work, but mostly the art of necessity. A flow or a push, whatever the case may be. An inexorable need, a hunger, a vacuous perpetual emptiness that cries out for needing.  The expression of something lacking in me. Oh, poor, poor pitiful me.  Control was never the issue. No issues were ever released before they're time.

Such a need to get in touch with my possessive adjectives or am I just possessive. So how does this relate to you? Everything does but you like me. I could leave it there. I won't. You like me don't like some parts of you. Yes, that's it.

Try it on for a fit.

Does it fit?
It should fit because I feel it fits and then moments come.

They're excruciating.

They’re despairing

They’re painful.

They hurt.

They drive me to my knees.

I think I'm possessed.

I hide.

I hide behind my invisible ink, with you.

Yet I am never alone.
I know you're not there but really does it matter.
You always have something to do, somewhere to be and then something else to do, to be, to do, to be, inexorably. Why do I use this word continuously?
You have turned your moments of reverie into a painting, a song, a poem, a dialogue, a whatever and ever. Never and never to just let it be. I scream but no one hears.

Can anyone tell me why I wrote this terrible scenario?
I thought I was the authorship of me, of my life, my script.
Can anyone tell me why I can’t write you back into my life?
Someone has sabotaged my authorship.
Not to sound paranoid, but I think negative entities have taken up residence in me.
I have cast them out invisibly with prayer and intention, but if nothing changes, I’ll know it was me.
I’ll post this now just to see if anyone can relate.
I don’t want to be all alone - with a poem I can’t write.
I don’t want to be all alone with just me.
I miss my doggy.
She loved me unconditionally.

Fringe seekers, yearning for truth
How alienated and alone are you
What vacuum of truth are you seeking?
What expression of you are you speaking
You have fallen into a bottomless well
Where safety is the only hell
Down you go
Like Alice
Down and down
It’s a wonderland of your own making
Backbreaking, Earthshaking. Heartbreaking
Painstaking undertaking
While the Queen yells
Off with her head
You lay dead
In the place where
Angels fear to thread
And they pour happiness molecules
into your head
Fools jewels
Because you are stubborn as a mule
And it all seems so cruel
And won’t learn your lesson
I told you it’s you
You, you, you
And there’s nothing I can do
It’s just a fantasy
Of your own making
The curious come to seek the keys
Keys to the kingdom
The doors are too small
The keys are too big
And nothing seems to fit

Pardon moi, si vous plait
Do you happen to know the way?
Qui mademoiselle
The way, quite simply, is anyway
It’s all just play
Play, play, play
I would like to play
Then why do I feel this way?