Death Defying

 There was a king whose son

Immobilized him. Literally.

Walled him in, to a living tomb.

The old man was standing in his way.

 

But the son, the parricide, did not know love, although he thought he was so smart: he was born without a heart.

 

So he did not realise for some time

that when his mother, the queen,

was graciously allowed to visit the incarcerated king, by decree of their son, she was recreating their honeymoon days with a man she loved.

 

She kept him alive for months by bathing

in honey and subtle, nutritious seeds

and letting her husband take sustenance

from her body, during conjugal visits, by ingesting and savouring her.

It was not just the protein and the glucose, we conjecture, that rejuvenated the heartbroken man, in the
face of the cruelty of their son. (They had had such hopes for him, and that was now gone.)

It was the love, the offering, the generosity. The way even now, as their family was tainted and the lines threadbare, this woman invited him

to undo the clasps and ties on her clothes, and take what he required from her, until his need was satisfied. Her gestures gentle and eloquent, her arms extended, her face open to his eye.