Broken Heart

He done broke my heart

the night we said good bye;

he to return to the feudal village,

I to dance across the public’s eye.

“That is not the way to start. It should read, he broke my heart the night we said good bye.”

“Why am I not allowed to write the way that I want to write? Why can I not use the language and speech of my childhood to portray the pictures my words create?”

“Because that is not how I brought you forth! I have taught and molded you to become the top Poetess of all times and you will continue to follow my path.”

“Yet they are my words, my truths why can I not use them they way I see fit?”

“Because you ungrateful wraith, without me you would not have this fame and fortune. Without me you would be back in that village you so long for mired in poverty.”

I lifted my head, greasy hair falling back, revealing pallid skin and blackened sleep deprived eyes. He loomed over top of me, pristine and put together. His suit a navy blue so dark it bordered on black, a piping red tie, winking tie pin, he was everything I had loved and now loathed.

He rested his large hands on the desk, leaning forward, the pungent aroma of his cologne overwhelming me. Citrus notes interspersed with undernotes of vanilla and sandalwood. I could smell my own stench, a mimosa of unwashed body and hair, the perspiration I sweat to come up with my creations. I was not the lovely Poetess revered in inner circles, I was the poet in a small cell, my emotions and anguish how I create.

The thick chains of dependency wound around my wrists, shackling my legs to the desk. Illusionary, yet they retained me as much as real chains would. I was caught in a web of my own making. But there was a choice, one that I had to make.

“It is time for you to leave,” I breathed. “Time for you to take your life and unentwine it from mine.”

“I am your King, your Maker,” he roared. “You will not take from me what I have worked for.”

“You have worked nothing, nothing that I already did not know. You wiped the ashes of childhood away and lead me along the path to stray,” I seethed. “You never meant for me to be this welcome, this loved, but plans have a way of changing and now the time has come.”

I glared up at him, daring a rebuke. Never had I spoken to him in such a way. His nostrils flared with unrequited rage. His body shook with the repressed desire to make me behave. He had lost and he knew it.

I felt my heart break in two

with the soft snick of the lock catching as the door closed;

He who had brought me up, who taught me polish and truth

my betrayer, my warden, a man of circumstance.