Evolutionary Fiction & Poetry


Dorothy Bates


The Prince on the White Horse is Not Coming

He got drunk, overdosed, impregnated several adolescent girls.
is in jail, and his horse suffered a broken leg and had to be shot.
Furthermore, he never wanted to play the role in the first place.
He needed to run across open fields, ford rivers and streams, climb
mountains, ride naked through forests where branches brush his shoulders
and ravens fly down to take bits of food from his hand.
He wanted to spit waterfalls, piss rivers, crack rocks with his fists.

He longed to straddle a winged horse, travel the skies and drink
from the Milky Way. He somehow sensed that he was meant to be a god, but
it never happened. Somewhere in the last few decades, a new moon hung out
in the night sky, held her luminous breasts over the planet, and squeezed.
Men and boys had murky dreams of UFOs and alien visitors placing strange
devices in their secret places but nobody suspected that the implants were
Moon-born and started back before there was Time.

The prince on the white horse is not coming. He will no longer be husband,
soldier, worker, slave. While young girls dream of that ridiculous glass slipper;
of bridal gowns, diamond rings and wedding cakes with two tiny plastic dolls
on top, the prince has been digging his way out of that maximum security prison
known as a "belief system" and, bloody and bruised, has dragged his desperate
body through the barbed wire and escaped.

Finally free of his chains, he has given Cinderella the old Bronx cheer.
That deep strangled moan in the background is the sound of many maidens,
crying because the prince on the white horse is not coming. Ever. As the fairy
tales die, he’s reborn in the sky and the horse that he rides is flying.


 Copyright Dorothy Bates, 1999

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