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- Consider
- a girl who keeps slipping off,
- arms limp as old carrots,
- into the hypnotist's trance,
- into a spirit world
- speaking with the gift of tongues.
- She is stuck in the time machine,
- suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
- as inward as a snail,
- learning to talk again.
- She's on a voyage.
- She is swimming further and further back,
- up like a salmon,
- struggling into her mother's pocketbook.
- Little doll child,
- come here to Papa.
- Sit on my knee.
- I have kisses for the back of your neck.
- A penny for your thoughts, Princess.
- I will hunt them like an emerald.
- Come be my snooky
- and I will give you a root.
- That kind of voyage,
- rank as a honeysuckle.
- Once
- a king had a christening
- for his daughter Briar Rose
- and because he had only twelve gold plates
- he asked only twelve fairies
- to the grand event.
- The thirteenth fairy,
- her fingers as long and thing as straws,
- her eyes burnt by cigarettes,
- her uterus an empty teacup,
- arrived with an evil gift.
- She made this prophecy:
- The princess shall prick herself
- on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year
- and then fall down dead.
- Kaputt!
- The court fell silent.
- The king looked like Munch's Scream
- Fairies' prophecies,
- in times like those,
- held water.
- However the twelfth fairy
- had a certain kind of eraser
- and thus she mitigated the curse
- changing that death
- into a hundred-year sleep.
- The king ordered every spinning wheel
- exterminated and exorcised.
- Briar Rose grew to be a goddess
- and each night the king
- bit the hem of her gown
- to keep her safe.
- He fastened the moon up
- with a safety pin
- to give her perpetual light
- He forced every male in the court
- to scour his tongue with Bab-o
- lest they poison the air she dwelt in.
- Thus she dwelt in his odor.
- Rank as honeysuckle.
- On her fifteenth birthday
- she pricked her finger
- on a charred spinning wheel
- and the clocks stopped.
- Yes indeed. She went to sleep.
- The king and queen went to sleep,
- the courtiers, the flies on the wall.
- The fire in the hearth grew still
- and the roast meat stopped crackling.
- The trees turned into metal
- and the dog became china.
- They all lay in a trance,
- each a catatonic
- stuck in a time machine.
- Even the frogs were zombies.
- Only a bunch of briar roses grew
- forming a great wall of tacks
- around the castle.
- Many princes
- tried to get through the brambles
- for they had heard much of Briar Rose
- but they had not scoured their tongues
- so they were held by the thorns
- and thus were crucified.
- In due time
- a hundred years passed
- and a prince got through.
- The briars parted as if for Moses
- and the prince found the tableau intact.
- He kissed Briar Rose
- and she woke up crying:
- Daddy! Daddy!
- Presto! She's out of prison!
- She married the prince
- and all went well
- except for the fear -
- the fear of sleep.
- Briar Rose
- was an insomniac...
- She could not nap
- or lie in sleep
- without the court chemist
- mixing her some knock-out drops
- and never in the prince's presence.
- If if is to come, she said,
- sleep must take me unawares
- while I am laughing or dancing
- so that I do not know that brutal place
- where I lie down with cattle prods,
- the hole in my cheek open.
- Further, I must not dream
- for when I do I see the table set
- and a faltering crone at my place,
- her eyes burnt by cigarettes
- as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.
- I must not sleep
- for while I'm asleep I'm ninety
- and think I'm dying.
- Death rattles in my throat
- like a marble.
- I wear tubes like earrings.
- I lie as still as a bar of iron.
- You can stick a needle
- through my kneecap and I won't flinch.
- I'm all shot up with Novocain.
- This trance girl
- is yours to do with.
- You could lay her in a grave,
- an awful package,
- and shovel dirt on her face
- and she'd never call back: Hello there!
- But if you kissed her on the mouth
- her eyes would spring open
- and she'd call out: Daddy! Daddy!
- Presto!
- She's out of prison.
- There was a theft.
- That much I am told.
- I was abandoned.
- That much I know.
- I was forced backward.
- I was forced forward.
- I was passed hand to hand
- like a bowl of fruit.
- Each night I am nailed into place
- and forget who I am.
- Daddy?
- That's another kind of prison.
- It's not the prince at all,
- but my father
- drunkeningly bends over my bed,
- circling the abyss like a shark,
- my father thick upon me
- like some sleeping jellyfish.
- What voyage is this, little girl?
- This coming out of prison?
- God help -
- this life after death?
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