Work Text:
sew the ring into your vest;
they’ve spilt blood on the family crest
but it’s no thicker than water
come in, sit down, in a place you used to call home
step deliberately over the threshold you used to bound over
simmer in the fact that you are a young master here, no more
you sit after they do, an opening for negotiations
surrender no ground, offer no boons
the right hand of the father is someone else, now
(revel in the loss of that seat and all that came with it
but it’s okay to mourn what might have been, too.)
make fleeting eye contact with your brother
think very loudly at him and hope he can hear it
over your mother’s cries of betrayal and doom to the family line;
he, the saving grace, the newly anointed crown prince
he, who has held that title in all but name
as you have held its shadow and its lack
white sheep, black sheep, you have found your shears
spun your own skin and wool into thread, into yarn, into rope,
rope for a ladder, ladder out the window cracked open in the back.
and you tried to think very loudly at him, then, too, but if he heard, he didn’t come.
should we go down with the ship?
if the captain goes down with the ship, and your brother refuses to leave your home,
does that make him the captain? does that make him the ship?
does that make them the wreck?
you, who wove your lifeboat from your own shorn wool,
reached for a hand. no one reached back. so you built your own
something to grip. and you want to be that for him
but you have shown him the escape hatch exists. shown him how to reach it.
so when you think very loudly at him, you just hope he hears
that you love him. that you’re sorry. that you
made it out and the grass is green. the grass is alive, the grass isn’t the
withered tangle of thorns that is all you’ve ever known
in the back garden of the cursed home in london.
the motto a string of letters, a noose they tie for themselves
out of their own prejudices and misinterpretations
the difference between you and him isn’t that you got out, and he stayed
or even that you wanted to, and he didn’t
it’s that you believed there was an ‘out’, that there was a ‘beyond’--
for all that he was so much brighter than you,
you held the hope
of a beyond, of open skies and no threads binding you to the black death.
and you could’ve been wrong. at times, you thought you might have been.
but you know now, you know you were right. you have found the beyond
and can only hope he knows it was never meant as a betrayal
to him, anyways. but if you cut pinocchio’s strings, and
he’s still a marionette, then he’s just a limp, wooden, doll, frozen in time;
he must lift himself out of their grasp. he must reach for your hand himself.
forever is the cruelest promise no matter the intention,
no matter the context. it was never a truth. it was a hope,
freshly expressed and then freshly twisted;
now, still twisted, but no longer freshly so.
rotten, now.
when you ran,
you didn’t take much. the pewter ring
that stings now, when you wear it,
as if it knows what you’ve done.
you can’t bear to leave it behind, though;
for all you’ve renounced your family,
for all you’ve proclaimed they’re hopeless
the small, innocent, part of you, the
pure
part of you still believes they might rediscover the meaning of purity, someday
the rest of you knows it’s unlikely. knows they’ve burnt you from the tapestry;
knows you are a stranger to the womb that bore you,
the roof that cradled you.
the rest of you (the impure, the grounded)
is what threads the needle,
sews the ring to the vest. to your chest. to your ribs, to your lungs, to your heart-
keep your friends close, your enemies closer,
your family closest of all. because you know how easily they can be
both.