Necromantic

 I opened an old wound last week just to make sure I was healing it right. I took a contentious book off the shelf of my heart and ran my fingers down the dusty pages. A tear in my thick skin stained the paragraphs with my blood. My eyes swam through the catalog of wrongs that I was professed to have done as my blood blotted out accusations.  I flipped the pages of the old tome of many authors voices, the lines repeating like a hymnal. “An anthology of fear and contempt; volume 1” is emboldened in fine gold lettering across the leather bound book.  Those that love me hate it when I read these chapters. “You must stop this” they say with exhausted eyes and tired attention. “This time is not as the others” I try to pierce their skepticism.  I sigh a knowing breath, as my fingers tighten across the pages.  I wouldn’t believe me either as patterns and predictions romance each other through recent memory.  With my blood stained fingertips I scrawl a confession in the margins of the wrinkled page. “I had a sliver of culpability, of which their transgressions did not justify” . I rip the pages from this archive of demonization, casting a whole chapter into the fireside.  I set the book back on the shelf of my heart where it will gather a thick layer of hindsight, until it’s inks are faded in time.

There is a body buried in the memory of my mind. A graveyard of love cut down. I walk among the limestone markers with embossed epitaphs. So many spiteful last words. This boneyard is for the living that have died to me. In the dead of night I reflect upon the message of forgiveness, and its power to raise the dead. Some words catch like cancer in the throat. I cannot bring myself to enchant the dead. I bring fear to these living dead as most do not see them as the are. To unearth these rotting bones with their tongues of poisonous hate is to crawl myself into their graves, deep into nothingness.  My loved ones look through the storm within my eyes to a sky that rages with light and not light. Backwards they tread as death pours from my mouth. In this graveyard of the living, there is but one body buried still. It is of the man I used to be. Poisoned knives have drank their fill of my flesh and I am poisoned, and I curse myself for allowing them to cut me.