Untitled 19

Look closely. What do you see? A white rabbit in snow. No? I’m the memory of a bride, wedded to eternity: an extincting marriage. Draped in a pearl gown. Laced to the throat. Dressed like some decadent uneaten cake, ignore the teeth marks in the shadowed parts. I was his bridal-feast and now I feast on white, it’s in my breath and crackles in each bulbous vein. It eats me from the inside like an infection: my white veil now my shroud. The crows gather, their pebbles eyes stare. I’ll be the portrait of a bride, the hollow image, slant-hanging in an echoing bedroom, the odour of rose petals masking the creamed bed. Certainty can die in a heartbeat. Search my lifeless, unblinking eyes, wash your feet in their shallow waves- these puddles can’t overflow, the wound’s opening deeper. I’ll leave your moon-daisies in my hair and feel them wilt, or grow, rooting themselves to my mind. My skin’s the colour of cobwebs; I could stitch myself together and become, in the right light, a remembered figure. My veiled face could be any other bride’s. But the stench of my clenched wound forces me to shut Spring out. Numb the clocks, each tick the sound of grinding teeth. Dressed to die, am I already dead? He did not want my skin, the one that I gave him, but it’s no longer mine; it hangs loosely on the precipice. When in doubt, I loved; who knew that the skin could still bruise after death. In this skeleton costume, the statis blinds. The new moon watches obliquely; If I am still enough he’ll think I’m stone; he won’t recognise my newly marble heart: the dead meat-organ hard and cold. I fade and even the outline of my shadow disappears. I ooze that white smell from every pore and it twists my unbreaking insides into knots. I am decay, all I touch turns white but watch me yellow as the moon grows, beaming in the candlelight. Give me his heart. This ghost-bride is owed a heart.