The Aftermath of Getting Down Your Hair

When I imagined him,
I did not imagine a robber with sad eyes
and a fear of heights, who—
repulsed by the throbbing bloody thing on the princess’s tattered sleeve
—strangles himself with her wiry braid.

But still he set me free.
Let me tell you how I squander this freedom.

I burn the bridge before I get over it.
I flee to cities of smoky mirrors and murky greens.
The sky is my address, the haze my armour,
and the songs have soiled my shoes.

I ask the stars for directions
but everything they say hurts my feelings.
So I decide to spin madly in the same spot
under every phase of the scarred moon.

I turn to the bards and ask them to fill his silence,
but they only tell me what I want to hear.
So I end up bitching and drinking with
the ghosts of their wives instead.

I do not move an inch.
I am stuck in my phone, kissing frogs and
inhaling stinky cheese and the pages of hardbound books.
I am no man’s trash and no man’s treasure,
just a shrivelled up, shimmering thing that no one is allowed to touch.

Every good woman is a great contortionist,
but I squirmed in the confines of the idea he turned me into.
In return, I try to turn him into a poem, but to make a man fit into a poem
he must be made unrecognisable; a mutilated thing.
Still his sad eyes glimmer with mischief when he looks my way,
and when he threatens to leap off the page,
I am tempted to give him my calloused hands and feet so he can trample the
earth and do as he pleases.

But there is a reason I have turned him to stone.
He cannot sing or read the sky—
still I do not want to hear what he has to say.
I kept his last breath,
a feeble, trembling whisper,
and turned it into a raging typhoon,
spinning and spitting out brick and bone
and verse and prose
until it bleeds itself dry
and is swallowed by the sea that conceived it,
stirred awake in due time by the moulting of a scorpion
or the flap of a thieving bird’s wings.