Braie Jen

When she is close,

Her aromatic life force next to mine,

I sense a presence.

It is a matriarch as old as the sound
the wind makes when it shakes old growth cedar,

The eyes of Eostre weeping from storms
of a spring that’s nearing the season of Easter.

She has a son who lost his goddess to
that storm’s confusion,

A daedalic dynamic ripped apart by
society’s justifiable obsession with drug psychosis and delusion.

If you have a child when you are
suffering from addiction,

You will lose them.

A cryptic community of selfish sins is
subject to a government grift while you’re unslept, unclear, and
thin,

A semi-lucid actress may be dripping in
the beauty of love, life and the art of illusion.

But she is subject to these familial
intrusions.

Those devils with tithes of their own
to play and pay,

An economic structure that preys on the
weak,

Week after week, after week.

But this girl’s smile was borne of
Medusa’s glare,

And on each and every day it required a
stare of a rarity indescribable.

She could send men to a place of cold
stone where everything under her sun mattered little,

Her son’s soul crippled.

A beauty like this can leave your last
lover’s memory belittled.

The riddle of her back porch inspired
scorched ghosts to be ready to give up their best faces all laced up
with all the gravity and levity they could possibly summon,

Especially after three nights and three
days spent cooking themselves in urban ovens,

Pharmacologically stubborn.

For a few moments on each of these
nights techno-upped, sleazy, needy, and sweaty,

A hurricane goddess’s grin walks into
the room and the crowd becomes ready,

For more Braie steady.

The act of simply watching her
transforms the minds of the men into committing the sin of asking
“what will she let me?”

“And how much of my future will she
bet me?”

But that’s a lot of pressure for
Easter’s goddess.

A boiling pot of snake oil and
crystalline bubbles puddling above a fire,

Makes a decent man trade his honour for
dishonest and godlessness ;

A self-miring campaign of receiving and
repelling liar after liar after liar.

All heroes are retired in shame,

As she is drawn into game after game
after game.

But her being the inspiration that she
is,

She rises to each occasion with an
invocation of self-worth, unearthed and inspired by her story of her
young man’s birth.

The girth of this artificial community
becomes tried, tired and bested.

The men don’t care about her or her
son.

They are here for the sex, the drugs
and desires requested.

For so many,

The hurt, the screaming, and the heavy
falling down on her doors,

Pouring whatever it takes to show her
that she’s their deity,

Comes from a place where their cravings
are shallow, greedy, toxic and is not interested in the sound of a
second he.

Sounds too much like we.

She doesn’t want to leave her friends
and her position of atrophy.

This is now her family.

But,

Strategically,

She becomes more and more ready by the
minute.

There is a limit to what she can
pretend to be.

And any real relationship comes with a
contingency,

Her, the boy and any man set to steal
her heart makes three.

A lifeboat on fire in a sea of
unpreparedness.

Some men that surround and make sounds
that they genuinely care regardless of this precipice,

Contentiousness for a fight they don’t
even know how to win.

But as Braie’s hair falls down like
grace,

It becomes a ladder for lifting
enchantresses and enchanters to a place they want to be beside her.

They don’t think about how this
divides her.

Eventually, the strength of that rope
breaks,

Faking the fun turns to hate,

And blame turns in on itself,

Draining self-worth and belief in the
power of that young man’s birth.

She becomes a blur,

A whirlwind of her,

A girl that watches and lurks through
all of the hurt,

A pot of gold stirred, baked and burnt.

But this goddess has the strength.

She has the will.

She knows the smell of the kill and the
blood that matters so much more than the shrill water that shatters,

As it is offered and offered and
offered,

A sacrifice to herself on a golden dawn
drawing on long shadows and exiting with the exhale.

Escape is on her mind now,

No more will she be wilfully blind now.

She must find the time now.

How?

When she’s too tired to shout and
doubt will no longer leave her.

She will not submit to the story that
sits in the dark and waits to be her.

She will rip that page out and burn it
just to leave her.

Her fate must be that face she just has
to remember,

But her heart rests too far left of the
centre.

This is a queen unable to lift her
sceptre.

I can feel this lying next to her.

Her boy Tristan’s smile is her
sunshine,

A child that can bring love, life and
laugh lines for a lifetime.

It’s hard to see him now in the
night-time.

Can’t get up on time at the right
time.

The days slipped away like the high
tide line.

She stammers,

Then moments of recognition break down
the apartment walls with a hammer,

Flailing falls crash down to the floor
beside bits and pieces of the hallway where they all sit,

Hiding in the washroom,

She’s a bit too sad to be the
glamour.

The place is always empty with people,
faces, places and objects clustered and cluttered.

Braie’s lonely but never alone,

One hundred and one phone conversations
that roam,

Without a single connection or
corroboration that her heart is breaking.

Braie is emotionless and shaking.

Her home is cleaned by strangers day
after day after day,

But it still smells like a tomb of
decay.

Never high enough for the lie to be
forgotten,

The life that came from her life
begotten and then lost in,

The storm.

Every other need gets delivered on a
platter,

Shattering her focus,

On the one that was meant to be the
closest.

When she hears someone really actually
cares,

It is all just hocus pocus.

Staring at the clock, some wonder where
is she now?

They are scared of the answer.

And so is she,

Her son makes three.

But anything,

Anything,

Should be attempted to pull this
goddess free.

Open her light and empower her to see
what it is she can be,

Because it is her nature.

Braie nurtures and labours for her
faked family,

It is toxic to deny her place where it
has got to be.

A mother,

A matriarch,

It’s a lot to be.

For Braie,

It will bring her the power to overcome
and overcame,

All that is denied her,

The mother,

The leader,

Inside her.

Nothing will ever take her down again,

If the universe lends just one more
chance to attain her family at last.

So little time left,

Leaving minute after minute after
minute,

Slipping away so fast.

Eostre comes in the springtime,

It is her strongest season.

Please allow her the patience to listen
and learn from this reason,

Come sit softly Braie up here on the
edge of our city.

Look down into peaceful moments, quiet,
stoic and pretty.

The calm can be genuine,

If you just let it be.

Please don’t go back home

That house.

Those friends,

Are only a loan.

Braie,

You have not reached the end.

A sunny Easter waits for you just
around the bend.

This will be your time to rise,

A resurrection once and for all and
again,

Do it for Braie,

For Tristan,

And for Jen.

Should you fail,

I will always be here,

Your friend.