A few gnomic handful of years –
Hardly enough time to really live.
A dustbowl farm, scratching out a meager life
Left mind, heart and backbone unfed, unused.
Wandering unprimed through ferine woodland
Pricked by pines that climb,
Hunted by malevolence armed with magic,
Each of her wardens lacking
What she herself feared lost,
A kiss or a shiver felt one and the same.
Armed with little but her soul,
Pure, white and full,
Tender enough to bruise with a touch,
She scuffed reason along golden brick pathways;
A child of a future age, as Blake would call it
When sweet love would be thought a crime.

She walked, eternally wandered
Her limbs torpid and dull,
The horizon never nearer, ever distant
Vanishing, taking dreams with it
Her goal unreachable;
The curtains of night her single wrap
Her only blanket one of dew,
Proof of more than bad timing.

Memories take form to frighten and exhort,
Nothing stays the same but variety.
And the jolt it brings -
A garden where blooms shock and reek
Authored in a lilac wakefulness
Watching her need -
The unpardonable hitch of breath,
The stained hands of childhood,
A long moment spent in search of self
Paying the cost
Instead of skipping rocks,
Dancing, or the comfort of dolls.

Home is where comfort lines every corner,
Where lies are accepted out of love.
A place that fills you as you fill it.
It is a gift, thrown to her lap
Unwrapped, asking nothing useful, but
Whispers of courage.

Free their world and lift the guise
Of candy-coated servitude
Cotton floss slavery, sugary rape.
Under the care of their hate
They grow the grapes of agony
And press the sweetest wine
Your lips have ever met.

Yet it kills them a little to give you this gift.

Drink deep.