Kissing Apples

Antoinette is the Lily of a Gilt ridden Realm
Frippery palace of exquisite hauntings
Somersaulting in her chamber of secrets and lust
Clotted diamonds, cold on her milky white breast
Embroidered walls wet with her sacrificial tears
Mourning lost foxes and the passing of trees
Singing a favourite syrupy song
Biting snow white apples while
The Devil paints her scarlet

At the Ritual cutting of Pearls
Did she call to her God
Hoisted high to the Fall of her House of Rumour
Crumbs dropped in her wake
Gingerbread trails leading nowhere
The end of her Reign of almost Innocence

Antoinette wears a shroud made of taffeta lace
Candy colours dipped in kaleidoscope ink
Every eye turns to envy her bountiful flaws as
Her shoes tap along the Boulevard of Conscience
Birds sing in their cages, peckish for her fate
Pointing out the curves of her curses and sins
And the susurration of jailer keys
Troubles her slender neck
Head up in uncertain honour

Did she fake her Sanctified feasting
Shun their heretic dessert
Seek cake for a vagabond well wisher, unguarded
Leave behind a glass slipper
Tick tock clocks screaming at midnight...
Pumpkin carriages stolen for country soup

Antoinette dared a shabby Halloween rendezvous-vous
Paper wigs piled high on a carousel bonfire
In a dangerous flourish of furtive intimacy
Comic tragedy of errors splayed in lamplit corridors
Hidden ears glad for hearsay and pitiless farce
Gathered obscenities, printed by morning
Stretching her on the gossipers’ rack
Fraying every nerve edge
Warp and weft, unravelling

At the end’s end she murmured
I never got to bake pie
Or to change those godawful gold curtains upstairs
Wash my child’s baby hair
Disappear into a glass of champagne...
Wrap my legs around the men of my fetishes

At the end’s end, Antoinette closes her eyes...

...watches her crown fall, sees it tumble away
Picks up her violin of lavender laughter
Twirling as she plays down long mirrored halls
Orange blossoms threaded through her long white hair
Ecstatically invisible in her new luminous ways
No more gilt, gravitas or wretched corsetry
Forever is on the other side of today
Kissing rose red apples
She laughs, and is suddenly free