The Queen Has Lost Her Crown

How often is yes the last word on everything?

“Yes” energizes or enervates that moment between the desire and the spasm. The heart responding gaily, when invited, beating obedient to controlling hands. Ah my Queen, sitting on a burnished bed in a tiny room saying yes and losing all power for evermore. Off with your head now.

A terrible beauty is born in the remembered mating of minds. It is a portrait with big words that hurt so much.

Rememory is not just black American women's writing – a voice that needs to be heard – deeply beloveds, but it is something to be lived through. And if you are lucky – to escape from. Escaping history that nightmare from which, bless Joyce that crazy Irish man who was right, we are all trying to awake.

The son and the father. Oh Hamlet, whose father drove him mad, drove Ophelia mad. To be or not to be and when you ask that of the sweet gods, they say goodnight and drift by gently as beautiful ladies, a sect that you are denied access to. Ah, no Goddess be you, my love, my own sweet witch, just a woman – bleeding red in the eyes. And there they are, all the sweet, sweet, beautiful Gods, mere shouts in the street. An artist, a creator of one’s own pathos – oh look, there’s the portrait of the proud purple beauty carrying her blue hyacinths in a month of funk.

My fair lady, do you remember that fear you had of the father who would not step out into the rain even if it were your birthday in August? And I told you the son was just the same always worrying of weather that would be inclement? But you denied it. And later you denied me happiness because you and the father and the son and the bards singing would not see any beauty in our cuming (so many seconds of saying yes, do you know?) together. But that jug-jug (which you told me happens between dirty friends with unclean ears who have shared every half-formed thought) had a warming, calming beauty - not forced - a spontaneous expression that repeatedly said yes.

And now embracing lies, quiet and meaningless, in that speckled quagmire that was the mind we have let things fall apart. How can the world hold? But there is not even anarchy here, not a drop of the drip-drop water; hollow, empty, the horror, the horror, the Queen has lost her crown.