My eyes are each a glass coffin,
and somewhere inside I am dead.

I waited for your kiss,
inside the dank carapace of this body,
but you did not come; the bluebirds
saw you on horseback, hunting pheasants, the sparrows—
at ease on the arm of a handmaid’s daughter.
The hares eyed you, too, lithe and lying,
in a far-flowering field with the seamstress.
The faeries spied you with the peasant boy
sharing breaths between parted lips; they looked
from out of the thorned hedge, the hedge
between death and dreaming—and beyond it, my tower,
the tower from which I watch the world world move on—that peasant boy,
that molds himself to fit your desire, your whim;
the dark and quiet one,
whom, in your arms, and in a certain light,
sometimes looks
like me.

Fair mother pays respects, kneels beside
on the third sabbath of every cycling moon.
She brushes my hair, bathes my skin
in river water twice-crossed with arsenic,
complementing the poison in my belly,
the core of an apple rotting in my throat. The famed apple,
tainted orb which, by hand, she plucked from the branch
of a hangman’s tree, I knew by its snakeskin rind
beneath crimson dye, swallowed it anyway to please her.
Always her good son. Such violence—
the only way she knows how to love.
As I stood upon the threshold of the manor on the hill,
unfurling pages of tongue, blistering epiglottis,
it was still somehow sweeter
than the kindest
of your lies.

Years come, my only mourners,
crown my head with a wreath of dust,
dead beetles in the corners of my eyes.
My clothes tear where stitches fail,
rain-damp, moth-eaten.

Wake up! I yell at the breathless form.
Break your own damn spell.
I press upon the walls
of the castle of myself. But, how do you wake
from the endless dream?
Wake up, goddammit.

Something gives, a stone moves.
My crown clatters to the floor
with all the harshness
of a whisper.