Bleed for me.

A side project open piece I start the other day, specific to an idea I had whilst patting the cat.

Click the picture above. Mr. Hooker and Mr. Gibbons share a stage and a song.

H

☛ Rough cold grey granite blocks made up the circular shaped walls of her thatch roofed tower prison, a prison she had languished in from birth. A period stretching twenty isolated years, her mother’s weekly visits being the only contact with the outside world she had ever known.

 

She had cried enough tears in her confinement to have made a pillar of salt beside the small round wooden table she wept at daily. Salt and mineral creating a stalactite of misery, and yet it gave her a sense of achievement somewhere in the dark reaches of her mind. A tangible testament to the lonely days and nights alone.

 

Escape without death was futile, as the only means of entry for her mother was via the enormous length of hair she had grown, casting it through her open sided tower window toward the ground. Even so, her mother still needed to stand to full height on the saddle of her huge black stallion. A stallion of nineteen hands she had bought from a bargain bin at the local livery after an afternoons revelry at the local pub. Walking had proved to be a smidgen too difficult for her small gnarled and drunken frame. by the time she had ridden the ex-cavalry horse the 75 metres home from the nags place of purchase, her mother had named the hard mouthed, fire eyed equine monster freshly ascended from the hot place “Ken Orse”; a name that had endured years and a multitude of broken sticks and whips and branches. Beyond hair and horse, short of sprouting wings, there was no way gravity would have allowed her to survive the twenty two metre drop.

 

Her hair, whilst ridiculously abundant, was a gentle shade of cliché blonde. On raising her eyelids, one could gaze into her cliché blue eye’s. She was of cliché proportion from a cliché lass locked into a cliché tower, in a cliché twelfth century setting, as seen as the quintessential ‘damsel in distress and despair’ in only the finest childrens animated film. Everything about her was perfect in every way.

 

Then, on a beautiful cliché spring morning, a cliché handsome prince happened to be riding by, spotting her seated at her tower window. A cliché vision of sun drenched beauty filled his view, and after a few tries over a few days he had her on the ground, free from her captivity. On completion of their ride from the tower to his castle, insert ‘cliché’ here, and after a quick bath, a snappy haircut leaving her hair at bottom length, and shave of the kingdoms hairiest legs, the good prince proposed to her, to which said replied through sparkling cliché smiling teeth and lips“of course my darling”, and they were to marry the very next day.

 

Her name was ‘Gentle Annis’.

 

Of course.
☛ The Queen, a splendid ageless raven haired lady of enormous height, willowy figure, colourful disposition, and a fetish relating to the removal of the heads of unfortunate peasants whom she deemed to be ‘naughty’, was also one who appreciated things. Gentle Annis fell into this category, as such the Queen on learning of the impending wedding called for her gamesmen, and ordered for the immediate slaughter of the royal polar bear, and two of the royal baby white seals. She then summoned her dress makers and demanded of them a cloak of white for the princess as a wedding gift for Gentle Annis. The Queen seeing Gentle Annis as purity distilled, warranting a gift equal in colour to Gentle Annis’s vestal virtuosity with near religious fervour. A hooded cloak with the whiteness of snow and midnight whitecaps of a troubled ocean, designed for the winter months, as the kingdom held a permanent bone chilling frost. It’s design gave lean to a ‘riding hood’.

TBC