Wanting to be remembered
Lissa hid for over a year.
Routine ruled her existence.
At dusk she awoke to write poems
whose origins had come to her in the night,
the words of her dreams,
like gifts or omens.
Her dreams were sometimes
wolves perched on her chest,
their weight palpable,
bearing down on her.
Other dreams were lambs
gently bleating into the
curling cochlea of her ears, while
she breathed in lush green fields
and new Spring rain.
She awoke to feast on roasted mandrake,
parsnips, field potato, eggplant and tomato.
Night shade vegetables enhanced
her memories, rooted her deepest thoughts.
After wards,
she smoked the long dead grasses
pulled from near her cellar door,
inhaling their ergot-laced profundities.
She eased out at midnight. Enshrouded in
an over-size black cloak, her face and shoulders
turbaned, swaddled in a long grey scarf.
In the morning, papered in fresh bandages
and lying upon a growing heap of compost made up of shredded
photographs, debris, letters, failed autobiographies,
she would contemplate sleep,
dipping her inky fingers into a fresh bowl of manna
and ambrosia while sipping honeyed toadstool tea.
She learned to like the silence of her own company,
the scratch of her pen upon the parchment,
the pulsing itch underneath the bandages.
Every night, every day
it was wash rinse repeat...
for 365 days and a few more for good measure.
Until she felt completed, boiled down,
simmered into bare essentials, a congealed treasure.
Someone to be remembered. Not like in the past,
where she'd dwelt alternately
in shadow and glaring light. At various turns, being both an object
of revulsion or of adornment. Neither label having satisfied.
Both situations, intolerable.
Before,
she had not been ready for the world.
Now,
would they be ready for her?
All the words tattooed the once smooth surface of her
sallow skin. Where each line left off, a new one would
begin. They were a trail, an outline, a life
written nightly all over her body in various fonts
in indelible inks, every word that she thought,
every memory linked to a visible epidermal manifesto.
All that remained was the unveiling.
Copyright October 19, 2011 All Rights Reserved By The Author