give me back my fairy tales

Cigarettes entrance us 
because sucking poison through our lips
and letting the smoke puff out of our lungs
looks so much like the fairy tale dragons
that we never saw in real life, 

so we poison ourselves a thousand times over
offer knife sharp smiles when ask why,
hey, didn’t you hear? I wanna be snow white. 

there’s poverty in the way they walk, 
hungry eyes roam across an asphalt jungle 
and get stuck on the wires swinging from 
rooftop to rooftop, so much like pictures 
of a rainforest they saw but never touched, 

so they try to dream leaves onto 
non-existent trees, snickering as they say, 
i’m gonna tarzan across those wires one day, 
just you watch me, 

there's papers scattered around her 
as she dreams up worlds so vast that 
our universe looks more like a marble, 
stars coalescing in her dark hands, 

but when she brings her works to the publishers, 
they say in their unforgiving cold beady eyes, 
didn't you hear girl, Belle was white. 

they gave an American boy a gun 
so now he thinks he’s an American man,
but no one told him that men are scared most of all 
of the things they shouldn’t be, 
‘course i want a girl like Mulan, he scoffs, 
who wouldn’t? and then glances away as his gaze 
lingers on people that it shouldn’t, 

there’s a girl who keeps a knife in her pocket
so when the men start to shout she has something 
on her side, because everyone knows what follows
when scared boys pretending to be men raise their voices, 

and when you ask her how she knows what to do, 
she’ll say, honey, the first man Cinderella was 
disappointed by was her father, 

there’s a girl singing dripping in the glances
of men too old to walk her body, she is reflected 
and shattered in the glass of their amber drinks, 
as her song winds her way around the room, 
the men will say she’s like a siren, with her tone, 

and she will think while she remembers a hand 
put over her mouth to stifle the screams 
she thinks that Ursula wouldn’t be the one to steal her voice, 

so many perfect fractured fairy tales 
that hollowed our bodies out of their dreams, 
that scraped at our stomachs and our brains, 
so many fairy tales that we were promised and 
never got, 

so we live our entire lives in our minds, 
and when they ask us why, we smile, we smile, 
didn’t you hear, you gave us this dirty, dirty world
and you never told us why.