DOROTHY BATES

THE PRINCE ON THE WHITE HORSE IS NOT COMING

He got drunk, overdosed, impregnated several adolescent girls, went to jail, and his horse suffered a broken leg and had to be shot.

He never wanted to play the role in the first place.

He needed to run across open fields, ford rivers and streams, climb mountains, ride naked through rainforests where branches brush his shoulders and ravens fly down to take seedlings from his hand. He wanted to spit waterfalls, piss rivers, crack rocks with his fists. He longed to straddle a winged horse, travel the skies and ride the Milky Way. He dreamed that he was meant to be a god, but it never happened.

Then, one night in the Cosmos, a new moon slipped off her course, held her luminous breasts over the planet, and squeezed. Men and boys had murky dreams of UFO's and alien visitors placing star stuff in their secret places, but nobody suspected that the implants were moon-born and started back before the Flood.

The prince on the white horse is not coming. He will no longer be husband, soldier, worker, slave. While muttering about that ridiculous glass slipper; bridal gowns, diamond rings and wedding cakes with two tiny plastic dolls on top, the prince has been digging his way out of his maximum security prison and, bloody and bruised, has dragged his desperate body through the barbed wire and escaped.

Finally free of her spell, he has given Cinderella the old Bronx cheer. Those deep strangled moans in the distance are the voices of maidens, crying because the prince on the white horse is not coming. Ever. As the fairy tale dies, he's reborn in the sky and the horse that he rides is flying.

Aubade

I wake
to the sound
of rain
doing a Fred Astaire
on the roof.
The shower.
The shivers.
My old sweatshirt
takes me in its arms.

Eau de caffeine.
Hot buttered heaven.
Blackberry jam.
Vivaldi.
Nothing to do all day
but write poems.

Solitude,
my lover.

In addition her work as a lyricist and a "Listener” for the Spiritual Emergence Network, Dorothy's poetry has appeared in Rainbow City Express, Crone Chronicles, Creations, Shared Transformation, The Lantern, The Edge, Barefoot Grass Journal, SEDONA Journal of Emergence, Nomad’s Choir, WHAT?, Wise Woman’s Garden, Indigenous Fiction, Sightings (Live Poet’s Society) and : (Internet) Seeker Magazine (Poet Profile), Evolution’s Voyage, Realizations, Kundalini Survival & Support, Inspired Expressions: Poetry of the Soul.