bleached white bones

Her name is China. She is not of Asian descent, but her skin is china white so twenty five years ago her parents made the right assessment. She use to work for the department of public health and safety until she exposed a rat infestation there and the agency kindly ask her to resign. Now I watch her hold a glass of blood red wine in her lily white hand. The toxins of her full lips have killed me. I have risen but my resurrection is more like that of a flesh eating zombie and she is my Goth mistress. When I think of all the years I’ve spent without love and love making I am still trying to find the downside to all this. There is tranquility in her darkness. Like an undisturbed swimming pool; placid, but even the tiniest grain of sand can cause a ripple.

          I never thought this would be my destiny, but I can no longer enter a plea of innocent in any court of law, no matter how expensive my attorney or how unreliable the witness for the prosecution may be. I am guilty of being in love with this lingering life. Diving in head first only to discover a world of shallow water where jagged rocks ripped off every inch of my flesh. It looked so benign, a velvet liquid silk that now mixes it stinging salt with my body of exposed wounds. But in my faith there are no miracle healings only bandages and pain killers and a penchant for picking at the scabs.

          When I was a child I was weaned from reality by watching Twilight Zone episodes. And now I gaze upon this vision, ghost white in a black gown with ruby red lipstick, raven hair and eyes like black holes that prevent any light from escaping and believe that she is real. But there is nothing about her I despise and my proximity has now made it impossible to escape the gravitational pull of her eyes. Her ionic breezes are like a healing balm to my oozing sores. I prefer the summer solstice to the winter one but I prefer her to Mary Poppins and Sandra Dee.

          Because I have no flesh we are almost one. The pallor of her flesh makes it almost transparent. You can see everything that we ingest and our hearts are laid bare, but I do not care about the sideways glances or whispers between couples as we pass. Every minute of every moment belongs to she and I and we are eternal. Her movements are so graceful that she seems to be floating as she walks by my side; death’s holy bride, a haunting apparition. How can one so pale cause all others to pale against her beauty?

 

                   *

 

          Lincoln logs and store bought frogs are her dowry, but her hand alone has made me feel like the wealthiest man ..., well I am not alive, but she has still made me wealthy by showering me with wisdom by her recitations of Snoopy comics read by flashlight under a blanket like a make shift tent. She is heaven sent and I am mortal, born of vacant dreams and distant memories. Somewhere my creator stares at a blank page so crippled by writer’s block that he doesn’t even know his pen has run out of ink. Her creator is dancing with gaseous nebula in the farthest reaches of space.

 

                   *

 

          7 A.M. coffee makes it Tuesday and we vacate the bed for office decorum. Although she often tells me I still don’t know what it is that she does while I daily save the company by moving mountains of sand with a pair of tweezers from one side of the room to the other. We lunch together and carpool and coil around each other when we get home. We once had a pet but it kept forgetting to feed us and I got tired of all the lawsuits that ownership creates. We also gave up our hobbies. Editing the original footage of the Hindenburg disaster takes up all of our free time. Because love is more than red wine and roses and she doesn’t need these to know the depths of my love, for upon her first visitation she became to me everything that is sacred and profane.

          Her transparency has revealed her soul, born of an immaculate conception; I can see the heralding angels and three wise men. Her soul is expanding rolling over my universe like a fog, swallowing every particle of existence till she is my all and all. I drink from her streams and bathe in her waterfalls and am searching for her ocean so I can drown in its depths. And tomorrow all poetry will be erased from my mind so I can rewrite each one and dedicate them to her. She is to me what midnight is to the Catholic Mass.

 

                   *

                                                         

I am dancing in desert places dripping with her graces. Children weep when the games they play are not fair; just wait till they fall in love.

She has left me, she has left me, she is gone. Although she has never been east of the Mesa Dixie line she said goodbye with a deep southern drawl. I am staying in the desert because I never want to see anything white again, no white sandy beaches, no snow capped mountains, nothing that will remind me of her skin. I choose the desert for its lack of rain and lack of puffy white clouds. I will pick my teeth with cactus needles and take peyote and join in the mournful howling when night falls and I am haunted by the pale moon.

          My sorrow is like a child watching helplessly as his favorite balloon drifts slowly into the uncaring atmosphere. Only pigeons and boomerangs return everything else is gone forever. I use to believe there were lessons to be learned; now I see it all as that balloon slips from the child’s hand because of a misjudgment of reflex and muscle and drifts aimlessly into the sky. There is no why just helium that makes it rise and winds that whisk it away. It is the attachment to the balloon that causes the grief.

          Tonight there is no moon and I have not lit a fire and in this pitch black darkness I have closed my eyes, but I can still see her dancing with all the other ghosts that only she could see to a melody playing on a grand piano. I close my eyes tighter and cover my ears, but that’s all I can see and all I can hear. Even in death I will not escape her. I think those ghosts were her past lovers who died of a broken heart when she left them too. I bet I can find their bones somewhere in this desert. The animals cock their heads when they look at me then move on in search of prey that is not so willing to die. They know that such flesh will taste bitter. I will mate with this desert at night and melt in this desert in the day until my body has completely decayed and I am nothing but bleached white bones. Now I am the one who is china white.  

 

***