Destitute Princesses

Mediocre stutterspeech, bamboo-hut palaces, nonagenarian princes, and a million balloon-dreams waiting to take off.

Destitute princesses
are born in mountain-edge palaces
that stand on four bamboo stilts
like the silver spider's long legs
teetering
and held up by starlight.

They grow up in gossamer underwear
even when planes fly overhead
and dance with fair-haired enccantadas
cigar-smoking tree demons and
babies who died too early.

They rule over fruit-tree kingdoms,
rice-fields and riverbends,
watermelon patches and banana bunches,
fall out of jeweljade trees and
slip on mossy river diamonds.

The wise kings tell them:
"Wisdom is that which
lets one study coconuts
rather than climb them."
Sometimes they don't believe it
and go back to their spheres of
childish fantasies, adolescent marriages
and chickenshit.
Sometimes they grow up and learn to live
on tin cans, on dead-end jobs and in greasy hovels.

Destitute princesses learn words in crumbs,
by listening in on classes,
and devouring recycled newspapers,
stuttering as they go
make mediocre addresses
in murky foreign tongues
with twangs and burrs they cannot keep up with.

They are given peeks into greater worlds
and oceans of new things to drown in:
fellytones, snow, physics, western medicine
fashion, drugs, music and city-girl gossip.

They learn that rains aren't angel tears,
and that there's really no gold at the end of the rainbow.

They're taught to drive by nonagenarian princes,
and taught to love by bestfriend jesters.

They start to dream bigger,
thousands of balloons-dreams,
froth in their silver-crusted imaginations
like the turquoise sea-foam of their youth,
waiting to take off:
ivy league educations,
magazine covers,
town houses,
white-men prince charmings.

Sometimes they forget who they are,
and who they are accountable to.
Sometimes they remember the beaten path to back-home
where they are remembered by the sylphs and waters and lilies
and are made real princesses.

End.

Dedication: for all the girls back home.