An armoured, decorated white horse
with startled black eyes
and a mad king
who is hated, and hunted
whose palace has balconies
and great glass doors
and books lining many shelves
I comfort the mad king
His hunters have disappeared
I take out a thin, red rope
from a drawer, and reach for a gold one
you tell me I don't need rope
(I think I do)
The mad king is waving his sword
he is delirious with panic
I comfort him
and a medieval book
is on a mahogany table
in the centre of the room
with colourful pictures,
I flip through it
(the wind rustles the cream curtains)
there are two colourless pictures:
two bodies hanging from a tree
in black and white
with crows, flying, slowly around
drifting on the wind like black stars
and a woman hanging from a different tree
with a ripped up landscape
(in black and white)
the pictures move.
everything moves. constantly
rippling like unsettled water
There is a picture of the white horse
with colourful ribbons of red and gold
his eyes are also gold in the picture
and beside the pictures
are descriptions which I don't bother reading
but on them are yellow lines
which are like strips of old stained paper
and when I look on the opposite side
where the picture of a field is
green and gold and purple-blue
(I enter the picture, in a horse and cart
I am a little girl again, I look at the farm
we are going to market. But never to return.)
I'm out of the picture again.
the picture is stained
there are lines of red, jagged
which when I touch, leave blood
on my pale fingers
blood from the cuts which I made.
all my cuts on the picture, staining it.
Marking it, covering the pictures
Someone (a man, possibly my father) is reading over my shoulder.
(25th August 2013)
