Still Beautiful

Still Beautiful

She's been here before
You can tell by the weary glint of her eyes
The look of one well travelled, worn down and experienced
Her cigarette glows in the murk, casting shadows on her aristocratic cheekbones
Showing the grace she fell from into squalor
Still she retains an air of dignity, her perfume is still expensive, refined
Old roses and fire and hot nights, wine and song and silk
Merely hinted at in the air, mingled with smoke from the cigarette
Slowly crumbling to ash in her hand
And she is still beautiful, crumbling to ash
Beautiful

That cigarette
She coughs, and you can tell she started smoking long ago
An attempt at class gone awry, perhaps
A gesture that became a habit that became an addiction
You can see the nicotine stains on her fingers
Her white hands become defiled parchment
Upon which a story is burned, eventually smouldering away into ash
The smoke floats around her, a halo in the darkness
Lit by the fiercely flickering tip, red as Hell and passion and blood in the black she wallows in
Nobody turns the lights on here
But in the dark she sits, immobile, cold
Still

She's still beautiful
You can see it in her tired body and her arrogant eyes
Like dusty emeralds, glinting sadly, bitter
They've seen too much
And said too little
She's still beautiful
A spider-web of scars shadows her face, her arms
She won't tell you where they came from
And somehow they only add to her appeal
Mysterious and perverse, she is impossible to forget
She's still beautiful
Her graceful shoulders curved inward from the years
Too many burdens borne like unwanted children
Suckling away her innocence
From rotting, sagging breasts
But she's still beautiful
Still
Beautiful

She died, one day unmarked in human lives
She didn't have time to finish a last cigarette
It still sputtered at her lips when they found her in the gutter
Bleeding
Emerald eyes agape in fear, her last pure emotion, her last hurrah
Was a scream
Nobody heard her, she was just another tragic statistic those days
There's always someone dying in the gutter
Screaming, smoking angels, their wings cut off in flight
She lay there, blood and sweat and burning hair mingling with the scent of her perfume
Old roses and Sanskrit, fire, entwined in the profanity of a sordid demise
And she was so still
Contorted in a dying fall, but so still
So beautiful
Still
Beautiful

Morning Is A Long Time Coming

Morning Is A Long Time Coming

At three AM everything seems much bigger and scarier than it would at a more lucid hour. This is possibly because there is rarely much of a frame of reference when you're sitting in your room in the dark, half dressed, dishevelled with exhaustion, your eyes and shirt tails trailing off the edge of your chair. Your grasp of common reality starts to escape you. This is the time when no insanity is beyond your wearied mind, no heartache too implausible, and no catastrophe unlikely. Anything could happen.

I think there's a reason suicides seem to happen at night. It's then that everything goes black, you're all alone, and you want the blackness to take you along with it when it leaves. It's an elegant departure, sailing into the wings, not tripping off the edge of the stage in disgrace.

Then there is the blackness less complete but far more common. An imperfect blackness, tinged with light enough that you see only yourself. Every twisted, malignant, incorrect, blasphemous part of yourself. You hate the twilight glimpses of imperfect flesh, the gloomy edges of a profane and frightening thought inside you, crawling between your ribs, out into the flesh you despise.

Sleep has left you barren and shifting, like a discontented sea. You lie in the darkness, and you hurt, your limbs ache, your body is wracked with the pain of exhaustion and paranoia. This isn't the first night you've spent hovering near tears, your eyes red, but too proud to shed their salted tears, which you know will burn like accusatory iron. You cannot cry and you cannot sleep.

It does not get light for many many hours, hours of shifting and sobbing, choking on words unspoken or unknown. You pray to a god you've long since forgotten that some coherence will manifest itself before you must pretend to rouse yourself from slumber. Before you have to leave your temple, your torture chamber, the horrible comforting blackness, leave it and wash your face, smile and talk and fill out papers. You pray. It is still not light, and will not be for hours. Morning is a long time coming.