It frightens me, how I've never so far been wrong with you, how I'm seldom wrong when it comes to men, and read their hearts like they're stitched to the inseam of my belly, How I could be someone else, if only you stopped behaving like I'm too young to know. You'll keep me inside your coat pocket to stave off the cold, but only until your moon-sliver heart thaws. Before the decade is out, you'll be staking your name for somebody who knows, somebody who doesn't fill your head and your heart with questions, someone whose name sounds like an answer in your mouth, so sweet and boisterous, it'll make you forget you never asked the question, in the first place.
What troubles me is, I've known men with mouths like yours since always, though never from up-close. Must mean I'm not yet scathed in yesteryear's wanderings to account for last night's mistakes, which spells (in turn) my being right over you. Like a lullaby, like a death, you peer at the clouds one day to find me pregnant with longing, and not something you've ever invited into your realm.
The sweet girl I was trope is only ever flattering in the stories, but in real life, there ain't so much you can do to turn around the bloodhounds. The life you live takes its toll on the liver and the eyes.
In another lifetime, I might've been the daughter of the king, but long time back, my father drowned inside a cheap, bored eye-roll, and stranded me here, in this nowhere land that I must now account for. Just because I've lived an orphan on this land does not mean I, too, don't have my nightmares, and know what it is to dream of waking in a different life.
You love me the way a child loves stories, hardly at all suspecting I may be Baba Yaga, as well as your little icicle queen. That I will set you a dozen unconquerable tasks until you run out of friends to help you, and fall down flat at the foot of my herd, to maul.
Inside the whirlwhind of you and I coming together, you readily recognize these vestiges of a fairytale, but forget conveniently that gorgons like me are also part of the story. Yet that was then, and now is a different matter. You've lived inside my land for months, have gazed inside my blood-filled guts, and still, you count yourself some haphazard Ivan whose luck remains, as ever, on his side.
You forget, my heart, this is no place for heroes. That you stumbled and lost your way over a trickster siren's song.
