Fairy-Tales

Fairy-Tales

The heiress leaves her charmed life
and sets off on a pilgrimage;
The princess is doomed to die in a charnel-house
and the maid steps on a throne to reign.
Nothing wrong there so long as the secret of their hearts prevails to rule over the picaresque tales of their diverse fates.
But somewhere along the line the hearts change
The narrator no longer holds the reins.
The princess, the heiress, the maid and the mistress,
all take over the burden of their tales
in a veritable kaleidoscope of doubts and trails
of doomed choices and begin to fade
in the aftermath of lies,
perceived to be true or caught up in the histories of suicidal waves.
What stays back when the tides recede is hard to tell.
Is beauty born only where the tide recedes
to expose a rubble of sea-shells
to be collected, deciphered and classified to be stored
in a museum of fiction to languish on shelves?