Mare

Is this a home?
Or some gilded prison?
In the dark dullness of a dead eye
that watches from the limen
I work the loom,
I cast the dye
I jig the spindle.

I wish I was beneath wild skies;
drinking in their visions.
Free to be unclothed, unwove, untangled
and drenched by the decanting
of their stormy wisdom.

Instead I slip between the morning and the afternoon
and each step rings a bluebell
that I pray might wing
some sanctity in you,
Yet you are glassy as a dead lake
Where I shatter upon reflection
empty as church echoes
invoking absent genuflections.

I cry at the closed doors,
and howl at the hollow hearted hearthless
Imposter I call home
Cuckoo
Fucked you
Still I raise you as my own.

Aye feral daughter
I scratch and scrawl and fill my maw with
butter wishing it wouldn’t melt so quick
The fear of being split between
howling holy anger madness
Or angel caged and sick
Sliced by either one wise dagger,
Or a thousand subtle nicks

And boychild you
cry, cry for the hurt you cradle
As the wild horse you thought
you’d wrangled
couldn’t be stabled
I bucked, I bit
I kicked and reared
Your bridle inspired nought but fear.

So go now to the apron
and cry
tend the cut i scored on you
As though a babe were born of the wound.
Give yourself fresh reason not to do
Anything, for anyone unless somehow
It favours you.

I am a mare,
we both knew
and on the page
etched by my inky wrists that once you gripped
my shadow is tattoed


So I’ll leave you to your paddock
and your fear of the untamed
the world is here to serve you
at least that’s what you say
So that’s why your world is locked at
five foot squared
full of fleece you can call home
and no place for a mare.