Red Shoes

Alice in Wonderland. Please drop a line or two

The Girl Who Runs Still

Azure dashes paint the sky,
a merry girl with shoes that fly,
through cornfields bright, where pinecones sing,
toward a home that hope might bring.

But the red shoes—
they will not still,
they dance and burn,
they bend her will.

And so she runs still.

Chorus Jamming in Her Head

Neanderthals mutter, troglodytes sigh,
Dostoevsky whispers, Gogol wry.
Saki blinks, while Nietzsche broods,
Freud in shadow shifts his moods.

Pollock drips, Basquiat cries,
Modigliani bends the skies.
Meisel, Parkinson—shimmer caught,
Roerich freezes, Vrubel’s fraught.

Toulouse swirls ink with absinthe’s fire,
Beardsley, Erté sketch desire.
Alanis aches, Piaf quakes,
Florence rages, Liberace shakes.

Painters, poets, madmen, muses—
each one tells her what she loses.
Yet none can show her where to go,
what hearth, what heart, what home to know.

And the girl runs still.

Sweet Escape

Then—music floods her, bone and vein,
an orchestra running through her brain.
The heart, a drum; the cells, a flame,
a holy rapture without name.

It feels like love, like sex, like God,
ravage and cradle, tender and odd.
But when the notes dissolve, grow thin,
the emptiness comes rushing in.

And the girl runs still.

Echoes of Life Lived

A siren rises from her ache,
blood in rhythm, memories quake.
Flashbacks bloom then drift away,
lost, then found, then gone astray.

It levitates—so bittersweet,
a glitter shattered at her feet.
Not the home her heart was told,
not the promise she can hold.

And the girl runs still.

City Lights

She stumbles through the gypsy streets,
where riddles churn and laughter cheats.
Crooked rhymes and chameleons bright
mock the day and haunt the night.

Golden locks in tangled bows,
a bouquet fades, the false wind blows.
She laughs aloud, though eyes still ache,
for this is not the home she’d make.

And the girl runs still.

Into the Wild

Cornfields bend, red shoes aflame,
she whispers softly, one lost name.
A cup of mist slips through her hands,
love unclaimed; it never stands.

“I miss you, all, yet none the same,
each memory burns, each ghost I name.”
Her heart is full, it overflows,
with love that aches, with love that grows.

The girl with shoes that could not still,
who danced against her own free will,
with hope alight, defying fate—
she runs still, before it’s too late.

@Rashi M