Marie, Sofia, Roger, and I

In the gilded cage a bird is dressed as a
teenage queen dressed like an 18th century cloud
of candy coloured smoke with a California girl accent,
no sly just mirrors, tulip buds curled so tight,
the sun hasn’t yet frayed their resolve to stay
unpeeled and therefore unwounded; that thing they call
blooming. She, shuttled and stripped and prettied,
off to see Louis, butterfly monarch pining
to play every game but important ones.
(Of course, after a few revolutions and royal massacres
you either decide the whole thing isn’t worth it or
you put on a good show, learn to wave right,
spend a pie’s sliver of your dollars and sense for the best PR
to avoid the one ruin that will siphon every last milli-hurt out
from under the ground, twisted vines growing and growing
until they topple. Instead, you lay it all flat, gems sparkling
just enough, a manicured green to look at never to touch.)
The frame dead centre, no sugar-lick of hesitation:
she is the main thing, you can tell by how big
her hair is like they say in Texas, and pageantry, and
before the violence, the world was roses so pink
they bled smelling like stems cut slant:
sharp and bright and so alive so thirsty so eager
to please oh please be put to good use.

‘Twas a shallow attempt, they said,
so untrue to life. Nepo-girl didn’t even try.
The fluff and the pink and the glaze and the
satin shoes (custom Manolos), the cakes,
oh the cakes painting hunger pastel,
rainbow parade of buttercream,
like entering a candy store, a dream-sweet platter,
such a distraction from the seriousness of the facts.
Elsewhere on the internet Roger Ebert the film critic
did his job, watched the movie, said all curt,
that this is what it’s about:
the loneliness of being female and surrounded
by a world that knows how to use you but
not how to value and understand you.
I can’t mince the words, add anything substantial
to the knife untwisting words of embedded thought.
So I cried sitting in my glass condo eating a coconut cake donut,
asked for the pink, extra sprinkles, this time out of spite,
a spite I’d pruned so perfect trying to expel it out of the garden
where a dollar is a dollar and pink is just a pretty colour.
I could taste it, eat it, smell it, drown in it or swim, whatever,
this sweet and heavy spite called life, while another grey inch
is laid to the waste and let me eat cake,
that’s what I said is what I said.