I gave them fickle fables
Far from forging truths
Fair young women
With facades cast over
Their fear-filled eyes
As they realize
There is no fairy tail
For fabricated dreams
No Prince Charming
Will fall for them
It is the princess fallout
That happens to
All folly young women

9/21/2019

I draw the Line in Sand.
My toes are brushing borders.
I feel compelled to forward step,
And yet I cannot cross;
The Line is as a barricade.

The Tide is creeping in
(it screams, it screams at me)
The Line is washed away
(i cannot hear it, cannot see)

It is gone.
And so I draw the Line in Sand.
This time further forward,
Always further forward,
Slow and steady,
Ever forward,
To the End I dread,
But cannot yet escape.

and then sometimes the waves come crashing in and
there is no Line – there is no Sand
and the swirling water engulfs my swirling self and steals the breath from my lungs
and irrational clarity pierces my hummingbird heart with icy claws
and in my desperation –

I draw the Line on Me
A Life Line
To keep myself from crossing.

She had meteoroids falling from her mouth
when she spoke, a wish waiting
to be granted, and she murmured
to the young Adonis: forget me not,

and he, bare-faced, beautiful, perhaps
more than she, held her in his arms
as if she were Aphrodite herself
and promised: forget me not.

He always said the planets
aligned when they met, the sun
alight in her laugh and the moon
alive in her smile of darkness;

and he, alabaster, like a work
of Duquesnoy, shattered as the meteor crashed
through his love, terracotta rooftop,
the forget-me-nots burning, his hands stained like merlot.

And the girl with bluebell eyes,
stars on her tongue, teeth like the milky way,
looked to the angel-faced boy and hissed:
forget me not.

a thousand i miss yous linger
in the sky, stubborn clouds that they
are. but i am not tall enough,
nor can i reach high enough to
bring them down and spill them upon
the floor for you. so they remain
there, unspoken, unrained, unloved.

we breathe warm July air into our lungs
the breeze passing gently past strawberry-stained lips
we chase fireflies through the woods,
hands outstretched, reaching, reaching
our laughter is golden-sweet
we love like dandelions in bloom,
fleeting and fading
we stain our sheets with the mud of summer rain
or the blood of skinned knees
we wake in the dark to whisper secrets to the moon
we are so young and yet we are growing
one day we will grow large enough to shed this childish skin
but until then we will jump and yell like the wild things we are
singing a song of freedom and youth