Cotton Threads
In a castle ornamented with dazzling splendors lives a prince.
Feasting beneath dozens of chandeliers dripping with wax,
At a table once polished to a mirror’s shine.
Its surface remains blistered and dull with candle burns and dark rotting stains,
And in those scars forms shapes nearly human,
Something that remains both hidden and ubiquitous to the prince,
Desperate to claw its way through the splintering and ashen wood.
He turns to the banquet surrounded by ravishing young women,
Ones whose laughter merely masks their torturous hunger,
Not for the man who lay under the crown but for the shine of his plentiful coins.
So, he pays for the company,
Praying it will fill the silence of empty desires which reverberate in his chest.
All the while he dreams of power, not for justice,
And not purely for hostility,
But for the promise that none of his desires can dare betray him.
And so, time, as it always prophesies,
Ushers the prince into a greater throne.
But the crown does not cleanse of the innocent blood stolen by its predecessor,
Instead upon meeting the prince it comes alive with a faint shimmer, as though it craves with the same hunger.
The boy who once longed for love
Becomes a king who rules with cruelty and tyranny,
His people swiftly bend and fracture under the weight of his impositions.
Far from his cinderous halls,
In the tattered hems of his rule,
A young woman keeps her candle burning into a melted pool long after the rest have slept. The candle burns low, but in the waxes faint shimmer she sees her reflection.
She tells herself that she seeks only a flame bright enough to outlast the darkness.
To shield herself
And the daughters
From the hands that always take too much from the wounded innocents
whose knees tremble and bleed at the weight of their desires
Yet for one who claims to gather armor, never jewels
She finds herself some nights
Wondering how it might feel
To guard a little more than she needs,
To let her heart grow a little bit sharper,
To never let anyone again touch her without bleeding first.
The king shrouds his limp body with the silence of other’s pain
The woman longs to finally gather her first breath
Such are the laws,
Not written on parchment, sealed off with wax or plastered onto books,
But carved into the shaping crown and hearts which form the quiet bending of a spine
And the invisible lifting of a blade.
And between them,
We must ask what is the greater power?
The crown that lays to rest on his brow, or the thought that waits
Unspoken in her mouth?
