"She Is...You"

By Peter Stone

©2014 Peter Stone

 

 

            I lay silently amidst the white, fabric

froth of dreamless waves,

 

            Helpless to prevent the unsettled sea

creatures of memory, frigid and stinking of

fetid necrosis, to circle me like a whirlwind of

impetuous regret.

 

             They nip viciously at my body, tearing

open the old scars, twisting and darting away

before my weary eyes can focus on their teeth

made of heartless reminiscence.

 

            They swarm into the shadows becoming

the darkness of midnight water, black with

trails of crimson ribbons behind them that

undulate in the painfully slow current of

endless night.

 

            Icy water fills my lungs with razor pain

and the weight of time’s current crushes into

my chest, softly pushing me downward like the

pressure of a lover’s hatred.

 

            A thrashing from my limbs does nothing to dissuade more of the hungry beasts, the waves spraying above the surface of past misdeeds. Time, the heavy current of the past, moves ever through the indigo seawater with nary a thought to the denizens within it. We are all subjects of its weight.

 

            Ever in this darkness is a jewel of light, a single star of salvation in an inky, watery sky of death. A siren light of such beauty and perfection I am grateful to have witnessed her desperately thin shards of brilliance, color and hope in this lost ocean world of dull blues and grays.

 

            A dark cape of cold fear wraps around me, stilling my frantic motions, but holding back the maws of hungry fish not at all. I am alone in the absence of hope, filled with bone deep agony and searing self-loathing.

 

            I see nothing but the organic, unreachable cascade of brilliance from her naked form, the only magic to have ever existed in this world. I hear an adagio’s crescendo mourn for lost moments, lost glances, lost embraces…almost drowned out by the volcanic crackles of my own tears burning deep chasms through the flesh of my cheeks.

 

            It is too much for one such as I, a weary, ashen penitent trudging the endless highway of loss. Color has been long denied me. Beauty; a thing only of fantasy.

 

            At last, my eyes start to close to embrace the darkness for a final time, but it is my name that denies me the solace of painful ending.

 

            She whispers my name as if velvet had a voice. As a passion-entranced paramour does when time has frozen for long seconds and the breath of lost control is sighed in my ear.

 

             I am granted a final feeling of infinitely soft and heated flesh against the coldness of self-hatred. She is the water of a tropical island never found by the rough hewn hands of another man. Her eyes, the sunlight that sparkles and dances with intelligence and desire across a vast, watery desert of turquoise. Her fingers, a warm zephyr through long, bright, verdant fronds.

 

            There is no more beautiful a comfort than my name echoing from the gentle surf sliding up the soft curves of a yielding sand.

 

            She grants me this with the same indifference a flowering Sweetbay magnolia grants the ground with its petals.

 

            She casts off the rainfall of color, caring nothing, for the bloom is merely a prelude…

 

            A splendor that lasts only a few furtive moments…

 

            But reverberates for all eternity in my heart.

 

            An ultimate gift only she can bestow…

 

            Before darkness claims me.

 

            The moment before death is a symphony of pleasure and beauty worth all the pain of a life, a soul, beset every second by organic and willful knives for a decade of decades.

 

            She is life, visceral, painful and cold. She is death, an orgasm of beauty, solace and indifference.

 

            She is.

 

            She is.

 

            She is you.