She was drunk and cock-eyed beautiful,
a leaf twirling in a silver-lined puddle of melancholia
with watered down sparks jumping from her feet
like an old film of broken chandeliers
black with dust,
swinging morbidly in her patchwork head.

her button eyes cried precious stones
and I could taste each crisp diamond
a birthday cake with no breath to blow out
the five candles.
the absence of a lover,
creating ripples of cold
through my corn-blue flesh.

and then all her dreams
collided and scattered,
like a swan into a wingshield
in a dreamscape that seems
so long ago
at the tail-end of a severed rainbow.
out of season frost dresses
the white tattered feathers
oil stained,
as whistling memories
stumble along, entwined in prismatic clouds of mist
down the old snowglobe road
just outside her crumbling gingerbread house.

no one came to visit her anymore
as she sat in her squeaky chair in her chalk-drawn room,
surrounded by a thousand doors
with knives around the frames,
danger and foreboding she strung up herself
while humming a sickly sweet lullaby.
to a child that never really lived.

she was okay, she reckoned.
as long as she had her ciggarettes
and sugar for her tea,
but she wishes she could climb the stairs,
and never does,
as she fears she might fall through the cracks
into an incubus extention of her lonely world
with only a rabbit with one eye
and cotton for guts
to mop up her splinter wounds.

she allowed herself to day-dream privately,
fingers clasped around a crystal ball.
she used the back her hand
to practice kissing some candy-coated satan,
the one that didn't care to come for dinner.
and didn't see how green
her smoldering eyes once were.

and she knew,
she could have saved herself and the swan
from romantic slaughter
if she didn't have such a poetic outlook
on life and living
in a world where everyone
is missing a tiny piece
of their shoulder-blade.

but she still kept her window open,
in the hopes that a new rainbow would filter through
and wrote her poetry on the wall
in blood from her wrist,
so that pain
could possibly be worth
enduring.

one unexpected day, when the air
tasted like chesnuts and fire
a boy came around to see her,
and asked her along to an unintended trip
in the countryside.

they took off down the road
that was forever covered in snow.
and he began plucking the swan feathers
that settled out of sight so long ago,
like a hummingbird plucking berries from a tree.

they found her soul,
her mind,
her happiness,
her dreams,
and her spirit.
he gave them to her, stuck to his lip,
and for the first time ever
she danced in puddles
of melting snow.

she no longer sits in a chair that squeaks,
she and the boy now share a garden bench by the fire
he kisses her nose,
and she rest her feet on his lap.
but as they laugh like sunflowers
and dream like dandelion clocks
there's still a place in her chest
wherein sits a tiny stone
black as black,
arctic cold
and as they hold each other,
looking into each other's eyes
she struggles to breathe,
as he struggles to understand,
they know their journey is far from over..


and they have yet to find
her blood-stained heart.