She wears the perfume

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She wears the perfume,
and she wears it nicely.

It's hard to tell at first,
but there's definitely something

beneath initial wafts
and first impressions

of her.

I don't know how to describe it--
(let me gather myself, let me gather my thoughts).

She's an interesting person...
someone beyond her years.
I really see her differently,
and it's not just the scent that defines her.

Her courage to question a system
that she thought could be so flawless, and so
unshakably, unmistakably

Perfect.

She wears the perfume,
and she wears it well.


So well, in fact, that she's choking
on the illusions that the witches have brewed,

contained in a ... glass
ever so lucidly.

the drugs have synthesized with oxygen--
circulation running amuck in her cherry "snow white" heart.

And it pumps--beats--pumps--beats--,
all the way to her feet,
and her arms and her legs and her stomach.

Slowly, she's ingesting the surreal,
digesting the unreal,
and protesting the real
and learned.

She wears the perfume to cover all this. lost in
figures and places that used to be familiar, but
are really just trapped in foreign vortexes of her once
familiar mind.

And this is how she copes with it,
on the real,
dressing herself for false attention and
setting herself up for a dinner date with
disappointment and heartbreak and stomachaches.

And this is just her countenance,
her cathedral facade--perceived as high and mighty
and royal and INVOLVED.

The truth could not be so distant.

And she's crying, begging to me,
to ME,
to help her through this and to mend her
sprained ankles over missing these
FOUR IMPORTANT STAIR STEPS
to identify, and
to reach that achieved state of mind.

Minus the truth.