Blood-Red Rose Petals

When your gaze is soft and beautiful like the rising sun of your dawn

And every move you make sheds a little more light into the shadows of pain,

I know it doesn’t matter that your hands are always rough, rough with care

Care for those whom you don’t even know, lying still and in need of love.

You laugh as I rush for a bandage, a bandage to keep your soul from draining out

Your life given to others that they might live in peace and free from pain—

Yes, I know this is who you are, but when one cut heals, a new one appears

And the scars will forever remain to remind you and haunt your most distant dreams.

I watch as you leave once again, but this time there is a darkness of your soul’s windows

Not of malice, but of the constant dripping of life from the veins of your mind;

You put on your brightest smile and walk out the door, reaching beyond the stars,

The unseen grounds of awareness in the forefront of your mind’s eyes.

Exploding in bursts of color before my eyes I see you shimmer a deep purple

And I am worried, for I only see that hue in dangerous times of desperation

Pleading for a mental relaxation from trepidation and avoiding the cremation,

And I see myself, pulsating with magenta and crimson, watching and waiting.

My mouth is dry, and I take a sip of water, water that is said to have no color

And indeed it is different than most, taking on the hue that takes its fancy.

Now it reeks of emptiness, the horrible gaping hole so deep it seems it can never be filled.

I gaze into its crystalline depths, seeing not clarity but the color of broken hearts.

The tips of my fingers are slowly going to a shade of the deepest ocean;

As I sit in silent apprehension I beg for a sound, any sound to fill this dreadful emptiness.

But I hear nothing, the terrifying sound of nothing when you scream

And your voice echoes back down dark halls but nobody can hear you.

The mirror of reality shatters into a thousand pieces and my brain dissipates,

Dissipates into rose petals and fledgling butterflies riding the wind to eternity.

The coral melds into the forboding cold of endless nights alone in terror

With splashes of red on spotless white and a perfect uniform soaked with blood.

I can taste the bitter iron on my tongue and sourness at the back of my throat

But I can’t escape from the walls closing in; I can see them coming closer and closer

Covered in ash and stained with blood. I flee to my sanctuary of sunlight melting sea foam.

I just want to disappear like the bubbles on the seashore. I fall into darkness.