Beauty.
What is beauty? Beauty is in the mind of the beholder, beauty is as beauty does, the most beautiful rose has the sharpest thorns.
Blood is beauty – not metaphor, blood and sweat and tears, but real, literal blood, seeping flowing from a cut or from the insides. Blood is life is adulthood, is the womb, comes from the womb.
Beauty is in a girl who’s a woman now.
Beauty’s everywhere if you know how to look for it, but then it’s gone again. Shimmering, dancing away on the wind like dandelion seeds, like an eyelash you wish on and blow away. Throw away your wishes and hope the world throws them back at you.
Red is beauty. Not pink, but red, red so bright it screams at you from a cut or a collar or the reddish orange walls of a clay canyon. Red is beauty, red is what catches the eye and holds it while it screams its message to you.
Beauty is a girl held down by cuffs or ropes or promises, beauty is a bound foot, beauty is a bound head. Beauty is a breast unbound, hair undone, clothes unworn. Tossed upon the floor like dandelion sees or eyelashes, thrown away because they’re too precious to keep.
Am I too precious to keep, or too dirty to save, or too broken to piece back together? Did you throw me away because you wanted me and couldn’t bare to watch it go wrong, or because you were sick of dealing with me, or because you knew I couldn’t be saved? Did I slip from your hands like a penny from a pocket, sliding through holes that you didn’t know were there, and in the end not important enough to go back for?
Too late, I’m in the lost and found and someone else has picked me up and taken me away. I’m collared and bound now, my beauty is in ropes and collars and promises, not in wildness that won’t be contained, wildness you have to throw away to love.
