K. Hartless

The Beast Within


Roses grew
on the trellis of Aurora’s tattoos
as she slept through the century.

Beauty,
casket of youth,
years ornamental
photographs forgettable
silken skin laid to rest
within silken album sheets.

Aurora’s heartbeat never raced from passion,
but in her lifelong dreams, she pondered
whether man would mature past dragon.

Burning fire,
wide wings of ambition,
scales of privilege
hardened as armor.
The dragon’s world is intimidation,
and possession.

While beauty dreamt of riding spikes,
her keeper hoarded o’er her skin.
She was the best of that year’s bloom,
which he would not dare to awaken,
preferring his prize kept in a case.

Secretly worried that her beauty
might kill the beast within.

Written for a fairytale image contest. 300 words or less and had to incorporate a classic fairytale. I think I may have hit several.

14 comments

    • Thank you, John. I wrote it thinking about all of youth’s mistakes, but it sort of did take a turn for the monstrous. I like to think there’s still hope for less male violence in the future. I appreciate your thoughtful comments.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      • I really hope so too; every time I watch the news there’s episodes of male nastiness and violence; it’s enough to make me despair of my gender; not that I’ve always been perfect 😦

        Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s