corpse

and a sweet fragrance upon a corpse. With a scent encouraged by a shadowed light upon the frame, unto seeming fair repose my steps undertake.  Carried and driven with floral ode as bit, over slumber-struck cadaver hear I echoed and flickered hidden dancing song.  Do tune and breeze white wrist fair turn?  Does shallow breath stir dove-wrapped corse?  And unto me I do lie.

Upon still lips a kiss bestowed, and a thirsting cold strides upon my neck.  Fair paint is scratched, flower flame cools azure.  Curséd curséd, I am cursed: twice, a hundredfold.  Body wracked in stoop, a horror, a whore.  Skeletal wreck and I am deceived.  Am I more dead than she, the siren?  Beauteous song of plague.  A wave of rats within I plunge.  Writhing, scraping, screaming, tearing, twisting, teeth and tails and ragged fur, wet perspire, mud and lick and bite and strangle.

The dead calls to dead and so I come.  As it is dead in me, the silent song.  I dance her dirge, stuttered and a fool, a tom tom fool.  Be amused, you gray corpse: I dance for you.  A cadaver fugue, each limb to hum your treacherous theme.  My puppety strings pulled, rent to break.  Rip my strings, I beg.  Release me free, your slavish wretch.

Why do I return?  Why locked I chain to this dead thing?  And unto me I do lie.  It was not me, I am cursed.  It was not me, it was another.  I am not chained, I am me free.  But eyes drift to neighbor hill, to path before, and I see her there.  Painted, drifting in the wind.  My name in the vague corner of her smile.  My name in her twisted recline.  The tom tom fool, the puppet and slave.

And perhaps the twist, perhaps the ah-ha, perhaps the thing I hide is... that I killed her...