When glass slippers go out of style…

She lived happily ever after,
That maiden with the breakable glass shoes
She never had to step lightly, tread with care, was
Never warned that if she put her foot down hard,
The see-through status symbol would shatter into pieces,
Maim her delicate little foot so it would never fit again
She was taught young and learned too late, happily never after
Still, I have to admit I envy her persistence of imagination…

Watch mine shatter on the ballroom floor,
And belief does not come in matched pairs, you know
My fairy tale ingenue's faith is broken and all the king's
horses and all the king's men have never had the eye
for detail and hairline cracks that it would take
to put me back together again
For now, I cannot write a happy ending, but I
remember what it was like to let my hair down on those never-ending
nights when you would let me down then pull tight
remember what it was like to imagine the happy end of you and I,
that would last forever, memory slumbering still beneath
once upon a broken time…

When I first met you,
I could imagine you as I saw fit to imagine
You were the tale I told, the words I wrote
A mythical creature built of ideals, imagination,
artistic license, and Disneyfication,
with a smidgeon of truth to make me believe
Or at least pretend that you were worth my canvas,
worth my paints, worth your gilded likeness on the page

Before I knew you,
I could create you out of wispy dreams and fantasies
A mass of dreamy hackneyed generalities to bridge the gaps of you,
all I did not know about you
Or at least a pretense to delude myself into believing the
-----------distances between u------- s----------------
were not there, that there was no moat and no monster to
stretch all the feigned, fabricated truths of you to
the full extent of the bridge of your wooden liar's nose,
to the brink of torture

Now I know you,
And I do not dream again
For who dreams of a human boy with faults on a white steed
courting a damsel who is hardly pretty but horribly proud?
I have given up on Lancelot, given up the flimsy pretense that his name is yours,
I cannot pretend anew that my dream is you
So says this disillusioned princess whose fairy tale ending ran
-------------------------------------------------------------away with the court jester
But, "Ah," says she in distress spun into gold, "Still I remember once upon a time."
I remember when you were far-off lands and fortunes that
I would never see, thus you could never disappoint me

Why couldn't you have stayed on the page, stayed beneath your armor,
stayed in my imagination, and thus stayed in unfair maiden's heart?
Why couldn't you have slain the dragon of reality, stayed an enigma for me?

So I lock myself in the cold, cold tower of my cold, cold heart
and throw the fantasy I've been spinning into the cold, cold hearth
And so I demand of the Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, in the end, who is the fairest of us all?
"Love, of course," she reflects across her fractured face, "Love and war."
"But which of the two is fairest, love or war?" I beseech.
To which she replies, "Oh, what's the difference?"
All is fair in love and war, indeed, brave sir knight
For none can conquer a lost cause, pull our swords from the stone of each other's hearts
For none can win and none can fall when there are equal casualties on each side
I've never feared failing to guess your true name, good sir
I feared knowing it, feared when you would stop spinning gold for me
For if a puppet can be a real boy,
For if a beast can be a prince, it can work the other way around, you know
And we both knew that blasted shoe wouldn't hold out forever

For none of those stories are true
And nor were you.