Once upon a time,
I used to dream in Storybook rhymes.
That told of a Prince that would come sweep me
off my feet
He’d stand under my window and throw rocks for
me.
But that’s just it, it was a childhood dream
Those thoughts and feelings are long gone
And just like chess, I became a pawn
In the game of loveless love my parents had
played.
I was on the front lines and I suffered the
pain.
The front lines: where their weapons were words;
Their words were filled with venom the players
felt their opponent deserved
And I sat as a child and merely observed.
And through my sufferings I learned to deal,
By making a way that I would never need to heal.
Once upon a time,
I closed off this heart of mine,
When I learned that there’s no such thing as
storybook love,
No such thing as the fairy tales I would dream
of.
I kept it secure and in doing so I became
distant and lost
But I did it so I would endure, I made a promise
to myself, and on my heart I traced a cross.
But Once Upon a Time
I was a little girl
And I lived inside a Beautiful, Stained Glass
World.
Once Upon a Time
My Parents were in love
They Lived A Happily Ever After
And said “I Do” under the church rafters
I believed in love at first sight,
Along with unicorns, and fairies and evil
dragons in flight.
I remembered to always look for the silver line,
But that was only once upon a time…
Once upon a time, my parents faced a steep
Incline with a cliff on their side,
They were ready to jump and forget about me,
myself, and I.
If they had the love that I had learned of,
Why were they so ready to give up?
There was supposed to be a light at the end of
the tunnel
But the dark just kept dragging on.
What was I supposed to do when they wouldn’t
live as one?
And they would tell me that they were still in
love?
I would learn to live with how my life became
what it is today,
I thought the war had come to an end but I
realized it still rages within,
Because even though it’s a few years later
I now see I’ve hit the
iceberg, and like the Titanic I’ve sank into a frozen danger.
The waters froze my heart
over leaving no room for the warmth and love of another.
This leaves me to wish I
could return to my once upon a time,
Where everything around me
was part of a soft lie
Leading me to believe that everyone’s life story
started with the words “Once upon a time…”
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This
piece shows creativity in that I relate the feelings a child experiences during a rough and choppy divorce between their parents which creates a custody battle over the child to common knowledge, games, and history which makes it less hard for the audience to sympathize with.
I find it engaging in that it rhymes almost as if it is a twisted "storybook rhyme" and that, for this generation especially, it can be very easily related to the reader's life events if their parent had a divorce. This shows growth in that I hadn't
written a poem before where I actually said what life event I was
writing of; it's not hidden under a veil of ambiguity that is known as an
allegory.