Restraining Life

I know that I was born insane 
to love so much the face of Death. 
Insanity romanced me even when 
a child still dwelled beneath infernal skin.
Why could society not understand 
that all I’ve ever really wanted equals none?
They knew I never fancied animating flesh 
but would not let my life be done.

I couldn't stir myself into the mix
of scribes and commons laying decent laws 
demanding that I shadow the shadow cast 
by some thin, mortal God.
I've always been enchanted by the doomsday trim
of lightness edged with Death’s esthetic claws
and yet, new dawns decreed I stay
and left me pinched in Life's stiff, rigid pause.

I pined away in darkest corridors for He 
who could erase the curse of knowledge learned.
My Alabaster Wraith, He sat with me while Life 
held me confined and counted out my every breath 
as if a promise that he'd wrest the soil 
back from my hollow bones 
and press my spirit back into the dust,
so I might find some peace, in the unknown.

I often pled for cruelest remedies 
that Life's more favored inmates feared 
because each torture treatment let me glimpse 
His lethal cowl and my demise. 
Mere breaths and heartbeats stood 
between my sickness and the cure 
for Life's oppression of my soul
that lay too far on Death's frontier.

I've never sought forked-ray lobotomies
or sun-salts poured in night-stained eyes.
I never yearned for freedom or the sun
but revelled in the sweetest dreams 
that I would breech the human warehouse walls
but not survive the birth,
become a husk of inert flesh allowed
to find asylum in the earth.

Restraint within a man-made tomb of Life 
was all the Hell I ever feared and yet
my mind was so incurable that by and by
I was abandoned by the pious saints...
until there rose a hero on the still walls of
a midnight void of Death's sure faith;
He came and he collected me
my Alabaster Wraith. 

 

Stone testaments commomorate a Life
I never lived or wanted to have lived,
a number chains my bones in place
where people forcefully preserved
Life's longing for itself.
My meatless parts communicate
a warmth for living that I never felt 

but balms of death have healed my hate.

Copyright © Jean Marble | Year Posted 2009

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