Coffee-shop hours and cigarette-ends
Mark where our fairy-story starts:
Such gauche romance and childish hearts
Spell artifice and compliments.
Painted eyes beneath dyed-blonde tresses,
Clad in second-hand dresses and broken shoes:
Her charity charms your usefulness
And sugary trail of bread-crumb clues.
Mesmerized by her enchantments,
Casting illusions that you need:
A wooden puppet made to dance and
Hopelessly obsessed by greed.
Mimicry and bawdy laughs
Comprise your silver repertoire;
The screen will be your epitaph –
Your grave, a silent cinema.
Lipsticky kisses carelessly tossed in
Your open arms like smoke but there’s
Always something missing so injection
Is an option but addiction is a danger.
She’s fucked up, thinks nothing of classes,
Snorting the worst ones most days then
Entertaining their advances
Like a wax doll melting in the sun.
Different lovers every night,
She’s the best friend you’ve ever had
But won’t relent without a fight
And sometimes worryingly mad.
Mascara tears blacken her cheeks:
You blithely sweep away her fears,
Maybe for the next few weeks
Until her hands reverse again.
Innocence consumed too fast -
Those childhood days weren’t meant to last
But where was Pan to save her skin
Or the man she thought was charming?
Disarming whispers in the night
Distract you as your face feigns sleep, still
Trying to desperately to fight
Back wishes unfulfilled.
Back to front and everything,
Confusing thoughts caught in between
And garish memories of gin
Drunk straight from bottled figurines.
Holes in her tights don’t worry her –
You’ll sew them up with borrowed thread,
A faulty patchwork tabular
Of all the books you’ve ever read.
So she’ll come close to falling
Like she always does and you, my darling
Will call and drag her home this time
As always, then recite a nursery rhyme
Of happy-ever-after endings –
Terrified that you’re pretending.