Crime Scene

The reconstructed history of a deconstructed body, this is a crime scene.  White chalk on black asphalt beginning to bleed.  A single red ribbon snakes its way down, out of my brain, my ear, my gasping nostrils.  Picking its way around pebbles, tainting the gold of fallen leaves, the sanguine river runs away from me.  It is encouraged by the rain.  

It is commanded by gravity to seek out the bottom lands, but obstructed by trash--a dirty white sock, a crumpled parking citation, a fading piece of patriotic cardboard--a dam is formed.  And there my blood and the rain have started to pool.  Like the sponge that was my heart, the stocking sops up everything.  The oil that coats our streets, our lungs, our lives adds a slippery rainbow to this stew.  The puddle catches the light from passing cars, the changing lights, the traffic lights, the plaintive revolution--blue, red, blue red--of this conclave of emergency vehicles. 

My life force is evading me:  if I live I will be paralyzed, if I die I am a coward undeserving of the gift of life, of being.  I must prove myself.  I must fight, but I am so very tired...

My open eyes look like brashly polished marbles; they are fixed on the pale blue light emanating from a single, unnamed star.  My eyelids are fluttering, a wounded bird's anxious wings.  The star calls to me.  There is a high-pitched hum to the voice.  Rather than making a decision, choosing a side, I allow my eyes to close.  I slip away, down, falling into a coma.  On the laser blue highway of a star's fading light, I have left this body barely intact.  I have gone to a planet made of memory and imagination.

The autopsy halted, the memorial cancelled, but the grief remains the same.  Despair soaks through everything.  Tears surface, then burn, then turn toward the earth with a blur and a thud.  The weight of this body is profoundly greater without the feather of my soul.  

They roll me onto the bed like a corpse inside a bag.  I have been placed in a small room, a narrow bed.  The loved ones speak in anxious whispers, the doctor in a tone bored with his own authority.  The last attendant dims the light as he closes the windowed door.  He looks back.  He thinks he sees  me smile.  He pauses.  Nothing, as if the room were a vacuum chamber.  Must be a figment of his imagination.

This is the dream chamber.  This is a box made of mirrors.  This is the mind, once gorgeous now torn, that is entrapped in a body that is already flaccid.  The sinew unravels.  The tension is released as I sink--stone that I am--into cheap linen in a cream-colored room on the tenth floor of a hospital overlooking the river.