The Beautiful Moritican.

The beautiful mortician they call me. I weave the toe of my shoe into the dirt. Trees conceal me, everywhere I turn a wall of trees closes me in. I cannot be beautiful if no one can see me.

My obsession with death had started young, I lived in a world where my parents were everything, they filled up my young life like water fills a fishbowl. Yet, a second later, kissed with cancer, they were gone, leaving two empty shells to dispose of in some glorified landfill.

I clenched my eyes shut, recalling those pearly white cheeks stretched hollowly against curious cheekbones.

                backpedaling through time
                                when translucent membranes
                                replaced yesterday’s smile lines

I had been advised to convert feelings into words. A friend once told me poetry was like vomiting your emotions. I needed my emotions out, but I was hardly regurgitating them. They dribbled laboriously and contemptuously from my fingers.  

                generations passed
                                too many flies on the ground
                                effervescence beat out of them
                                swiftly, cursedly

I was the constant in a succession of death. Perhaps I was the catalyst, perhaps I was the curse.

I pressed down into the fleshy base of which my thumb grows from, barely detecting the steady chant of life singing from my veins with my pointer and middle fingers. I then remembered a boyfriend, a link in a chain that could stretch to the moon and back. This boy was one of the better ones. He’d held my small South American body into the curve of his own and quietly shared his seventeen year old wisdom.

                “while your heart still beats, you shouldn’t concern yourself with death
                                you are amazing
                                you are not a curse.”
                                sentiments sweet, like cotton candy
                                luscious pink taste that disappeared faster than he did

Here I sat, on some glorified tree root crushing a ballpoint pen between my fingers. I was back home in the jungles of Peru, back into the jungles of the mind, toying with emotions as if I controlled them. As if.

                                first my parents, a friend, a beloved goldfish,
                            a boyfriend, a teacher, two grandparents
                             they all fell.
                           One after the other after the other.

                I absolutely boiled in the thick, soupy air. My hair had fused itself to my neck through the adherence of my own sweat. Death is a funny thing, I realized, sometimes devastating, horrible, shocking, sometimes commonplace, natural, the circle of life. Death weaves its black cord regardless and blind, twisting itself through the abundance of life.

                                I seem to wear the curse of death like a pair of gloves.
                                yet it will always be alluring to me, romantic, mysterious
                                beautiful, it will always be beautiful
                                seems fitting, for I am the beautiful mortician.