NEPTUNE BURNS

La Bella Rosa

A RETELLING OF BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Mother likes to compare herself to belle from beauty and the beast / she says she has learned to see the round edges in a monster-man with fanged words and steel eyes / she says she has learned to be kept prisoner in a castle where she cleans the talking mantel piece / tick tock tick tock tick tock it chants to the grating of a worn out candelabra flirting with fire / time melts in flame and the castle is four walls of rock compiled into a now safe place /

Mother calls it love / she says you learn to turn an eye from the paintings of happier days ripped on walls and kisses turned nonexistent nonessential none needed / she says belle is a hero for learning to live in a caged love / and I can hear the lie lie lie /

Mother doesn't say this / she says she is the calm to father's cold / the naïveté wanted in every wide eyed heroine / and she is happy to be worn like a cameo of a memory to when flowers could die without a castle falling /

Mother is no belle / she is the enchanted rose / glass covered paper cut prone / lover of a man with secrets in his west winged heart / captor of lovely objects / mother who once wanted adventure is kept in a dome of fragile fiber / and i think she forgot how to get out /

I am afraid I too will become a rose / I am afraid I will forget how to be me if I let this love / inside

sweetsternum- for being the sweetest person in the darn world and for her beautiful words that inspire me always