An Inescapable Dalliance With Beauty

There’s no such thing as a wallflower here
No matter how beautiful a flower out are,
You’re in or you’re out, there’s no other choice
No hiding your splendor under a jar
Until you’re just another candle
With a twisted, burnt black wick.
You’ve already glowed once, already shown once
Don’t you know that that’s the loveliest trick?

Can it be that we are at an end, because you never loved me as I love myself?
Squeeze factory-made tramps, out of the girls we really are
And store them; stock them, on the shelf
Until we have only our pillows as life-rafts in enough tears to fill an ocean
Our makeup will run, and so we hold 

To that buoy, with intense devotion.

I always believed in fairy tales,
Until I woke, sixteen, princeless, restless
With baleful thoughts again turned
To circean allure, and bareness.
My shadow was always so pretty,
Because it twisted and shaped itself with the sun.
To change is perfection, and so we dance,
Hearts faltering, with the force of our run.