the witch and the wardrobe

I love you. I love you,
but I'm turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist

---

you used to be an ugly girl;
lips too large and splotchy skin
and all the boys avoided you so
you stayed up late and vowed
revenge by drinking in beautiful
things to charm and arm yourself
against them. you used their verses
to ease the ache, the balm of beauty
to self medicate. but by some twisted
trick of fate or nature - before your
heart had time to heal, spring had come
and it was time to bloom. pushed out
of the bud severely naked and unsure
how to act - so you studied the art of
enchanting, first yourself then those
around you. you crafted a character
for your new form and embraced her
a little too tightly the first time you
had a boy under your spell. you trained
your tongue into silver and practiced
fiction with such fierce devotion as if
you could trick your dreams into
coming true. I came across you again
after all these years and wasn't quite sure
if I was meeting the same girl
but the more you talked the less
it mattered, as I became increasingly
convinced with each word that you
were once a her or that she
became a you. the first time
you broke a boy's heart, you told me,
you felt like a monster, and secretly loved it.
smoke billowed from your perfect lips,
seductive, heart-shaped, dripping
scarlet the shade of poisoned promises.
they no longer had names but epithets
'the one after k' or 'the one that liked to
dance' and when you met a new one you
had already begun chiselling in the epitaph
of your relationship and taking notes
for its post-mortem/obituary: "beloved
no. 22: Halloween party 2012 - ???? "
you are not so much a poet but a mortician,
a cosmetician obsessed with your clients
yet morbidly detached, you pretty them up
before displaying them like mannequins,
only its their sighs that you paint, because
you decided that everything must be poignant
or else pinned down and revised or
remade - you perform these surgeries
at your workshop - that magical place
that elaborate room - the loom
that affords the ability to transform
yarn and thread into counterfeit change.
you used to be an ugly girl;
you still are, in many ways