The Suicide Garden Part II: Poison

There’s no substitute for pain. She can hear the laughter in the bedroom, can see the shoes perched upon the carpet like weapons of war. That’s what stilettos are in her opinion. She sees no other sensible reason to wear them unless marching into battle. How easy it would be to catch a man then, with the quick preliminaries of a contract.
Do you want to?
Sure, why not? Catch me, won’t you?
It’s over before it’s even done.
The apartment smells like an oven, overcooked with the spices and tastes of a meal gone wrong. Sex is carved into the place like a celebrity’s name. The remains of passion sullied in the papers are spread across the living room floor with the evidence. The whole room feels sticky and heavy.

She’s not going to touch it. They can clean up their own trash. He’ll probably make her do it later, though. And then maybe as a reward, he’ll touch her, lay her back upon the bed that not hours ago contained another woman, and fuck her into oblivion.
He wants her body and she wants his love. However, she’ll take what she can get in this relationship.
The voices have stopped. She stands there like she does every time, unsure of her position, where she should be standing. The bedroom door clicks open and the woman slides out into the open, smiles and blows her a kiss as she disappears out the front door. He’s standing in the doorway and beckons her over.
Who’s the other woman, really?

The Suicide Garden Part I: Nirvana

It’s a jungle, thick with the scent of the tropics in a pot. The vines curl upward and around the cheap knockoffs of Monet hanging loosely on the walls in second hand picture frames. The door clicks shut behind her, and her shoes hit the tiled floor of the foyer with two distinct thumps.
“I’m home,” she calls, balancing her purse, coat and the mail in her arms as she weaves her way through the obstacle course that is their apartment in her goal to reach the kitchen. It’s like a third generation art café exploded as the coffee drips across the kitchen floor and into the garden that is the living room.
The books trail off into the distance and she follows them down the hallway, knowing who will be at the end of the journey. She finds him unconscious across the bed, face down in the pillows, littered with the stubs of cigarettes long gone and the remains of a garden. Poppies and leaves bloom along the sheets, remnants of a dying summer. Opium and marijuana.
She loosens her hands and today’s mail falls loose, landing hard on top of him.
“Wake up,” she whispers. He won’t though. He’ll be out for another hour at least.
She plucks the poppies from the sheets and walks back to the kitchen, cradling them in her arms. The rush of running water in the sink, the sound of nature against metal echoes through the room until she shoves the bowl beneath the stream. She places the poppies within the water and watches them float there, sustained in animation as she curls up on the overstuffed sofa, a sad replacement for a lover.
She breathes deeply and leans back, her hands surfing along the gentle curves of her body while the buttons snap open, falling away to the floor.
It’s Tuesday, and she should be at work.
She’s at home though. Making love to a man who can’t participate and probably never will.

The Suicide Garden

It’s not like there’s much of a reason. An intuition perhaps. A desperation for something that couldn’t reach the light, slowly unwound and cut apart. Snip, snip, snip, scissors cut through any form of serpent. She can feel herself becoming unwound as she slides open and allows her dark secrets to flow across the pavement and into traffic
She leans back against the hood of the truck and fumbles with her lighter. Ashes flare up as the smoke curls past her lips and wafts through her hair. She is wreathed in a halo of smoke and ashes, glowing white against the pale blueness of the sky.
The truck is dead. She needs booster cables, a hero now that hers is gone. There needs to be something or someone to save her, allow her to move forward at the speed of freedom while she tears down the streets of the city and plunges into the back roads.
What are you doing? Where are you going? What are you bleeding and why?
She is bleeding in a painful internal manner as her red desire spreads out across the snow, sinking deep into the earth and coagulating.
She throws herself back into the snowbank.
She knows she is going to die and that he will find her. It is simple to accept. The question is when?

Madonna

You were red and I could see it crawling across your skin.
In my dreams you were lying on a white bed in a grey room. There were no windows, and the door was barred. No way to showcase the decision you’d chosen.
They knew though.
The shaming would be done later with the washing of the sheets at the banks of the river. The company would crow over them, with the hissing and clacking of their tongues in anger.
In regret for what you could have done.
In shame for they believed they had failed. For you hadn’t learned to follow the rules.
It wasn’t the right stain smeared across your body, formed from your flesh breaking apart by some opposite force for the first time. It was the one of many in a cycle, buried by the possibilities beating within your body.
Your thighs and stomach were sticky with red as it slid down and mixed together with the earth beneath your feet. The tick tock echoed as time moved slowly forward and beat her head against the walls all around you.
It was inevitable.
It’s impossible to be the two halves of a broken whole.

We would sit on the bed together and listen to the outside world. From outside the grey walls they screamed and called the stench of death upon you. They said you were unclean, waving their books and raping the Earth with their signs.
You were carrying life though.
They didn’t realize it.

I love your smile; in the way it completes your face. You were singing songs and whispering in my ears, drowning out the voices of rage.
You were refusing to listen.
This Earth is a circle.
This Earth is a tide.
This Earth is inevitable.
And they don’t see that.
They see a murderer as they rage against the preciousness of life.
“It was your baby!”
“God made you pregnant for a reason!”
You laughed and replied that you would have remembered sleeping with God. You knew who had been responsible.
You knew your decision.

Those are the memories I replay within my head. Of the days when the wind blew and flowers bloomed along the walls surrounding us. We sang, we danced and slept.
I understood.
I understood the reasoning behind you, the logic and the hope you carried within your body, pregnant with visions of the future.

You were red and I was born from it. The smells of eternity as they crowded out from within the body and spilled onto the skin danced around us, binding us together in a ritual older than everything.

It was the beginning.
It was the end.
It was our curse.
It was our gift that no other understood, blinded by their sick vision of humanity.

I understood though.
You never killed me, for we had made that decision together.

Monday's Lover

Monday is forever coloured in the shade
of somebody else's kisses,
painted blue along the white bones of the cheeks,
the budding flush running along the ears,
marking the face of a child caught
in the trappings of first love.
I only remember the soft whisper
of your hand, velvet in the ever tightening grip
of my fingers,
bubbling purple in our embarrassment,
broken light scattered within the strands
of your hair, alight with a fire
neither of us really understood.
For it was Monday morning,
cobalt upon the wire edge of summer's pale wings
as they beat against the mesh
of your bedroom window,
hands clutched together, eyes closed,
door locked with the damp air
soaking through my anxiety,
both of us laid back upon
the rotting frame your bed consisted of, trapped
in the embrace of Monday's lover's
kiss.

crossfire of these days

I carry this body in pieces,
the creak of my joints
as rhythm,
the collapse of my lungs
as weight,
the snap of my neck
as finality,
my heart black ashes
in the crossfire
of these long days just waiting
to be over.

tracing these moments

trace my fingers
over the bank of your ribs,
body carved open
along the green of the grass,
teeth smiling white
against the blue of the sky.
i need to swallow you down
this summer, your breath
hot in my ear, your hands
trailing down the length of my back
as i let myself fall open
into you, eyes wild,
skin burning
as we trace these moments
around the lake.