Mother

There's a woman whose facade and whose pride conceal a bruised, tender fruit. A soft, sensual delicacy, she is, as fingers dig into the flesh.

Pierce it. Maw it.

Juice will run freely from the devastating wounds, juice of an exquisitely damning flavour - its a thick amber syrup of a display. Rich; almost unbearable.

A paradox to the ballerina bones that hold such poise - her posture renders her an unreckonable force.

A contradiction to such a piercing, searching, unmasking pair of eyes - those which unnerve the way a cat's do when it gazes, unblinking, for long disturbing minutes.

A dancer's grace and feline's quietly intense superiority is betrayed when I encounter with compassion and discomfort the evenings that scotch whisky dissolve her immovable fortress of charisma and composure and I see plainly the crude stitches barely containing her poisons.

Its an uncomfortable kind of intimacy, a tragic display of vulnerability that proud lioness would otherwise mask seamlessly.

A bleary and wet-eyed version of the most beautifully carved queen I've ever known.

As I watch her eyelids droop over her unfocused pupils surrounded by a greyer shade of green, I wonder which is real.