Waking up Dead

::::From TombToTome:::: 

 ~::::Waking up Dead::::~

   Waking before dawn, Persephone finds herself curled in a ball at the foot of the couch. As she lay, shivering, her mind flashes from image to image, groggy pictures and feelings that seem like dreams, but she knows they are more than this. There is a subtle difference in the quality of these flashes of memory that tell her it is more than imagination.  Suddenly she is gripped with fear. Panic shoots through her half-numb body and forces her to rise to her feet. She looks around, as if she has just woken from a terrible nightmare... her eyes grasping for familiarity. There is no one here except her. At least, not in the living room. She's in her friends apartment...nothing strange about that. It's the feeling of death that shakes her up, that makes her heart beat wildly in the walls of her chest.  As if it were trying to wake her soul to something she is trying to forget. Outside, the streetlamps are on, the sun has not yet announced the new day. Inside, the cold atmosphere of foreboding wraps around her like silk. 

    As Persephone makes her way to the bathroom down the hall, she peeks into her friends room... she is laying on her bed, asleep to the world. As she gently closes the bathroom door, she realizes that she is afraid to see what she knows is there. Silently, slowly, calmly, she unbuttons her faded jeans and slides them down her chattering legs. There it is.  A crimson stain in the sacred fold of
her panties. Now there is no pretending that her night's hauntings were but dreams...she had been swallowed whole by the night and regurgitated in this dark and cold dwelling, left to ponder the pieces left scattered in her mind. Her soul too afraid to recall in that moment the enormity of the Shadow that now covered her. As she flees the building she is vaguely aware of fleeing her body, so heavy is the weight of what she knows.

    The steaming bathroom makes a fortress of her sorrow, the boiling water running over her flesh trying to remove the stain of Him. The Shadowman has left his imprint all over her, the white satin sheet of her existence now saturated black. No matter how hard she scrubs, no matter how deeply she digs at her flesh, she feels she cannot escape the vines that have tangled around her soul, suffocating her sense of Self and lacerating the last remaining vestige of innocence she had known. The tears feel  like daggers, sliding down her face, mingling with the bullets of blistering shower spray which, for a moment at least, make her feel that she is really here. Existing. Still.
   
 Persephone huddles in the still steaming bathroom, arms wrapped around knees, head buried in arms. She knows that she must leave her grandmothers house before she wakes, or else the desecration will be obvious. She gathers herself and manages to get dressed...sickened at the thought of wearing the same clothes that hold the smell of Him, the stain of Him. But with no extra clothes with her, she pulls on the jeans as if she is entering the skin of the devil himself.

(From Intro/ Linguistic Trickster Volume 6....poems from 1996 through 1998)