Everything Fades
I owned those faded ballet slippers
The pair my mother hung from a silver nail
Above a wooden frame over the kitchen door.

That door held the freedom I'd lost
Hidden away in silent cracks and putty filled knots
Lost in a tiny window of a tree that didn't remember.

Rabbits and march hares echoed my stardust
Danced the quadrille in my penumbral eyes
When I gazed at the silver reflection lost in a cupboard door.

Now the red roses are painted in ash the colour of molten sunsets
To hide the corsets in my heart
And make my tears the colours of words mute of light.

So she can hammer a rusty nail in weeping walls
To hang dusty dreams on grey boulevards
Above splinters over a stranger's door.

I remember who owned those handfuls of rainbows
Now caged in a swallow's sorrow
With Cinderella under the kitchen door.