The Undertaker

When times get hard my heart becomes a battlefield where soldier after soldier is mowed down by artillery guns still unknown to the opposing side. A French home in the 1400's where the plague grasps at the corners of a cotton sheet covering the young's heads, becoming an invisible boogeyman ready to snatch their souls. A rope factory ran by suicidal workers, sweet irony drips into their coffee as they prepare for the days work ahead of them, nooses literally hanging over their heads, a tantalizing escape but still a single loop and knot away. My own body becomes a graveyard, where other bodies plant themselves like stones of a stream, submerging straight into my skin. The excavator taking shape of a nearly dull knife. My soul must be the gravedigger and undertaker; both with a conceited mindset, wanting only pretty persons placed into perfect pits. God, this graveyard of scars that covers my stomach and thighs remind me that the dead can't raise up out of their graves, for since the scabs turned to new pink skin, and the pink skin to pale scar tissue, no hair has grown from the small white knots. This peach fuzz like peach tress, a sign of life and growth, of spring and renewal. If I walked to the cemetery that's a block from my house and sprinkled the peach pits that I hid in my pocket from the prying hands of the Grim Reaper and his slicing scythe, would they grow? Would the soil filled with the dead be able to nurture the seeds into saplings? My body is the earth, and my skin the soil, and my blood the bubbling brook, and my bones the hidden boulders, and the cobwebs that form between my fingers the dangling moss, and my hair the vegetation though now it seems as if a ravaging forest fire has left my body desolate of green, and my nose the summer night sky where constellations make themselves known, and my eyes the ocean where great whites wait for a chance to strike, and my curves from my breasts to my hips the mountains that my underfoot have came to call home. In ten years time I know that a letter will be written about my graveyard of regrets- "Dear You," it reads, "Yes I remember when our body was the hill of the dead, when it was a desert unfit for life, when we bought the surrounding highway and expanded our extravagant ideas: hate mixed with hope, pain mixed with plans, lacerations mixed with love; and we did it all in the name of art, for the sake of maturity, as an ode to growing up. But you, no we, are no bartender, we didn't understand that an artist needs the hate, the pain, the lacerations, the hurt of it all, but only in small quantities. And we tried mixing them together but poured too much gin with our tonic, and ended up drunkenly stumbling into a dark lake filled with all things bad. Totally submerging into that much pain sent us walking through a forest in the dark, and it's no wonder that we escaped with bloody arms and legs, where our insecurities disguised themselves as thorn covered plants that grabbed and pulled at painful angles. Don't worry love, You won't be barren forever, hold onto those peach pits, collect dandelions, pick wildflowers, let ivy grow from every corner of your body. Because soon you will stumble through a dark forest and instead of running through a thicket, you will fall down a bank and land on your ass. While you're laying at rock bottom, staring at the sky, trying to catch your breath, you'll notice that you weren't completely in the dark. It only seemed to be pitch black because with adrenaline pumping through your body, you became less attentive. But dear, never were you thrown to the wolves, you were walking in the light of the moon the entire time, but growing shadows of slithering snakes and finding figures kept you from seeing this pale lifesaver. So, believe me when I say that soon will you be bathed in starlight, and your white on tan graveyard will become our bright pink healing flesh once more. And while the skin is still stinging from being stripped of any self hatred, a gardener will come and pluck the weeds from your mind, rebuild the fallen fence, replace the rusting iron gate, water the cracked clay, sew the still hidden seeds. He will make you into ground ready for gardening. All by holding your hand, and wiping your tears, and kissing every patch of skin that covers a coffin of hurt. God, be thankful for him. Because where his lips grace the reminders, you will be made new, you will be given a second chance, you will become me. You don't see it right now because the dark forest is pushing in, but press forward, the bog can't stretch on forever." The pale reminders burn under my shirt as I type these words, likely because I can only hope that they are true. In a dreamlike trance I am flooded with a nightmare: the undertaker inside screams at me to get off of the freshly laid mulch that fills the flowerbeds that surround the Angel of Grief statue that lays at the head of an unfilled grave. And from curiosity I walk around the marble darling, and my lungs fill with black blood, my heart turns to a piece of coal, and my throat catches a sob that quickly resorts to slipping from my eyes in the form of tears, watering the gravesites of flowers that were placed to commemorate the loss of... of... of... The small headstone might as well have my name carved into it, for when I saw that the stone was blank I knew who that hole was meant for- someone who would be forgotten, who would die nothing but site for graves them self. As I leaned over the edge expecting to see a decaying corpse with cropped hair and red freckles, or a mangled figure with white lines covering the arctic surface of the bluing skin, I was met by something even more terrifying, a grave with no bottom. Fear touching my heart for the scars were added to my body in an attempt to become more of an intricate being with complexity and acuity, but the endless grave just reaffirmed what I ran from; no matter how much depth I held, this final resting place would never be filled. And when I wake from this hell of a dream, the "ten years time" letter becomes a book of thin paper, a holy grail of hope, nearly a Bible in my almost godless mind. Ten-year-from-now me, is likely sitting on the clipped wings of the Weeping Angel, rubbing the graveyard of regrets that became for her, and will become for me, the perfect place for a garden: flowers bloom even in the cold of winter, petals never wilt, thorns never cut. Right-now me, wants the battlefield in my heart to stop bleeding broken hearts of soldiers wives being handed envelopes of apologies. Right-now me, wants my nose to smell the flowers of the Scottish valleys rather than the burning flesh of the bodies piled high in French courtyards, where the bodies of the lives lost to the plague are stripped of all things worth anything, piled high in summer heat, and lit like nothing more than a bonfire. Right-now me, wants the rope around my neck to be untied and used for braiding doll hair. Right-now me, wants the scars to fade and the pain to subside and the happiness to pour in through hugs and kisses, not cuts.