Dragonfly
Singing your way through freedom, unbroken by the bands of time, by the rusty love of water’s edge that clings in the stolid smoky moonlight, sipping a nice hot cup of sour milk and feel it ripple in your veins, feel it strip away the bark of madness that used to pin you to the ground, used to singe you in a way that felt pleasant at the time but now just makes you think of green eyes and hot coals, patient love and endless lies, confusion that no longer exists, because you’ve clawed at destiny with bare hands and fought the dragon in the dark, sought after the jewel and found something far more precious than any simple slit of sapphire that kills you with kindness and a precocious lack of shoes, waits for sympathy you’re not giving and slams the door behind you with an insult begging for time and money when you’ve given your heart and soul, so you tap the hourglass and shrug and smile, point to the tracings in your own dust and tell them to walk barefoot through the blizzard, cause you’re certainly not handing out footstools or toadstools or anything worthwhile, when you’ve already sold that sapphire, moonlit beauty’s nothing to respect and lack of guile, realize both sides of worth, flip the coin to show them you speak simple and plain, solid worth and a sense of vengeance finely honed, you strip away the aura of light and see perfection for what it is, that pretty penmanship and graceful charm slew you so thoroughly forever wasn’t long enough, so eternity made you theirs, and still they claimed your soul as if it was their God-given right, given to God for right, and still you paced and chased and faced the dragon, lurking behind every shadow and traffic light, you slowly burned your way into memory and dreamed up a sort of impossible magic, gave power to those who had none to begin with, until you realized innate duplicity, and turned that magic sour, curdled, let it wither in the wind, and changed that fire-flickered dragon into a dragonfly.