Dead †

If there was a way to say it out loud, I could not have voiced it. If there was away to feel it, my soul would have withered. If there was a way to touch it, my hands could not have felt. My thoughts go astray; I open my mouth to speak but the words die on my lips. If only somehow I could elucidate…

There isn’t a way to save myself; salvation will not be bestowed upon me. I don’t know where to go from the crossroads I am standing at. All around me I see images that my eyes shudder at seeing, I wish I were blind; I hear words that make me wish I was but deaf. There are hands that have concealed bludgeons in them, hands that pull away when I reach out to them. I suffer the piercing of such hostile sentiments that leave me wishing I was better off dead.

I find myself on my own, all alone in the world, caught in the sands of time that are too potent. There is inky blackness all around. Not a solitary ray of hope. I wish I were dead. Oh, how wish I was dead.

I can sense the loathing behind the subterfuge of love. I can feel the asperity in the tenderness of their touch, and I see the abhorrence behind the benevolence of their eyes. I can hear the odium behind the ruse of their softly uttered words. Though they try vainly to veil it, yet I get the subliminal messages. It is all around, it is everywhere.

My mind is vacant, I cannot think. My hands fumble but I don’t find anything to hold on to. I close my eyes, the pictures fade away. I cannot see but I hear expressions that I wish I couldn’t decipher. The crushing words are there but the pain is no more. There is a light far and wide. Sweet music fills the air.

I cannot feel, I am elated.

In that moment of truth, the knowledge that I am dead dawns upon me.

 

On the graying stones,

A motionless form I see,

The tales within the dead heart,

Will never now come out of the dark,

The limbs won’t move, the lips won’t part,

The senses won’t feel, the legs wont walk,

The lavish, dark hair held so still,

The eyes have lost their lustrous shine,

It lies there motionless, the body which

‘Til today, I claimed as mine!

I have been screaming all night, but they go on ignoring my agonized squeals as I yelp for help. It is not that they are far, far away, it’s just that they choose not to hear my howls of pain as I thrash about in angst. It feels like walking into the blazing sun. I try to tell them about my fears of sufferance in the inexorable torment. My body tainted with mud that surrounds me on all four sides.

All that I ever held cherished is gone now. I have been talking to the shadows that are caressing the bed of the carved rock that lies above me and the claw at the etched boulder that is my gravestone.

‘Tis morning already? I am drained because of the night long wakefulness as the aftermath of the torture endured. 

Look here he comes now to me. Oh, at last he put the lilies beside my head… I call out, “Don’t leave, please, not already!”, my soul yearning for him.

“Please, stop a while ever so often, if only for my tomb lilies? I can still feel. I miss you!” Now he reminisces about me flaunting my luxuriant raven colored tresses in the town square. How I had a soft skin, which used to get tinged with a subdued shade of pink as I blushed. About my nervous eyes like the night itself as he looked upon me with such adoration. “You are beautiful, my love”, he whispers now. Euphoria overwhelms my soul, when he murmurs, “I still love you”, and softly touches the stone slab. "If only I'd bring you back to life", he says, his eyes brimming over. But how is he to know that even the subtle shift in the soil could bare the decay of my bodily tissues, my face set so hideously that it will leave him aghast if he were to cast a mere fleeting glance upon it.

I look around and see flowers for the dead strewn over each grave. There is a wild mess on the cemetery’s cobblestones. Thirteen more corpses just this past month, which have already been forgotten by their loved ones, are begging for lotuses. We all just pass away, get gone to become rotten and have sloppy bones. Down here, it is like being afloat in a sea of darkness, where horrors lurk behind every curve, and the body thieves poke at the corpses with sticks, sometimes even trading the cadavers for chrysanthemums and drown them where the maggots and black waters muddle up. And you said you will never leave me...