IN THE SERVICE OF HEAVEN

the wicked cupids pen a memoir | 01

{ a daughter's crooked memoir }

part one || a mother

The things my mother taught me

Were simple enough to snake into a child's mind and take root.

They grew into jungles of premature insecurities,

Forests of strangling fears with vines posed to kill.

I grew up with a crown of dead leaves on my head,

All tangled up in her beliefs, her religion, her old clothes,

Her fears.

My mother taught me that I was a starving queen.

She whispered into my ear as we lay, curled up in my bed,

That my bones were daggers, cruel little knives polished to perfection.

"Over the glowing hill, you will conquer," she used to say.

My flesh was the poison, thick as tar.

The blood in my scorched veins was molten onyx, dark as the aged bones

Of so many forgotten dead.

My mother's last breath whispered of my beauty,

Of a cover thrown over my sharp, twisted edges of steel.

She said my fingers were meant to be wrapped around throats.

And so my crown of dead leaves grew heavier on my head

As it turned into a crown of blood-stained claws instead.

My mother never cried within her lifetime,

But I think she wept the seven seas when she watched me from below.

She used to tell me that when I would get older,

People would crumble with my every breath, each laced

With bitter smiles and the sound grenades make as they set off.

Instead, I fed myself on my own poisonous skin,

Ripped and shredded and ravaged the deity she thought I was.

Out of glorious, rioting spite.

I betrayed my mother's ways for a slither of gold,

Spun the snakes in my hair into threads of sunlight.

I turned my daggers into bones, my poison into flesh.

My crown of claws became a wreath of dying flowers.

What is it that happens to starving little queens,

Their mothers' perfect spawns,

In that jungle that they tread through with each falling leaf?

What is it that dulls their adamant steel?

I never wondered, never thought that I was the reason.

I, in my frantic desire to cut down the jungle my mother planted,

Ended up growing one of my own, a jungle of premature insecurities,

A forest of strangling fears with vines posed to kill.

For my very own starving queen, whose daggers, too,

Will grow to be nothing but bones.

[ starving queen ] - one with predestined, infinite potential, waiting, craving for a chance to release their monstrous power, itching for a single slither of time to set themselves free

[ crown of claws ] - a symbol of power belonging to the princess of havoc and ruin whose price of mercy is death

[ jungle ] - the looping labyrinth of life in which each fallen leaf is a world quaking apart others, shredding the continuum of existence

[ mother ] - see for yourself