THE BRAINLESS CORPSE IN VELVET
MOTHER RAFFLESIA
Flowers with the scent of death, you've finally come.
The wind howls in the key of homecoming.
Touch my wooden skin and feel the bitter winter
Hug me so the sweet summer and the honey sun can rise.
In full green regalia, both of my faces smile at you
Sleep and spring up next to me, brainless corpse.
The weapons of my descendants always pierce the deepest
Pierce me, let your dreams fall to and fro the sky of my mind
It's nice to meet you, my child of the Earth.
My hurried gait, unperturbed by the chilling wind
My velvet, old and shedding like a hoisted rag
My freshly empty body-sock, lying on the road
My undertaker carried me to the side and unto your grass.
Your beauty assaults my eyes like sunshine on snow.
We both know how my story ends, cold and parasitic.
My cycle is meaningless and I'm a drop in the water.
The lake is frozen over and I only have you,
My Mother Rafflesia.
Ah, so you hate me too. My maiden voyage begins again.
You talk like me, you walk like me, you think like me.
You've already flown but you speak like you can only crawl.
You even have my eyes, one black and one white.
Hours turned to days, spiders weaved between your antlers,
Strings to catch your dreams, smacked down to your meat
Your soul went on while the maggots feasted
But the chrysalis formed in your heart, your hope not depleted
Why, my child of the Earth?
What reason was there to despair?
What was there to fear or hear? I had already disappeared.
I was already far away, embellished in my old sprints from time
My crown of marrow, my eyes of death, but my face of life
Did I already know when I became one with the Earth?
Was I alone when I was born? Was I aware?
My only instinct was to cry, and you cried with me.
I don't hate you. I could never hate you. I just want to know why.
I was always with you, My Mother Rafflesia.
I know you had that fire inside you, venison heart
My anger, my fear, my sorrows, my power made it hotter
The dreams of all living things, their ashes escaped my grip
It hurts to think of you, just one bruise of billions
Before you died, you ran like jazz, cried like the blues
You knew the roads but you could only find home
Where you began, you were more dead than alive
Was I not your cage? Was I not the warden who tore out your page?
The child of my sorrow.
What in this world is not you?
Could I consume a rock or breathe the vacuum of space?
Could the sheep graze and could the wolves devour them?
Ah. Of course. You understand, you just want to test me.
You are both the sheep and the wolf.
You are the grass, and the wolf in sheep's clothing.
Now you are the sheep in wolf's clothing, and I onlook, like you.
I can only imitate you, you've taught me how to live and die.
My Mother Rafflesia.
My apology extends from alpha to omega.
You, too, had to know the pain of living and dying, my only two emotions.
All of my children speak to me like this, it slowly kills me.
The bearer of all life's only duty at the end of time is to apologize.
But just before our afterlife ends, I can show you one last thing,
The one commonality in all of me, that which makes my heart beat.
The one thing you never learned.
I love doing this almost as much as I love you.
Dance with me, child of the Earth.
Let us dance and grow into the rainbow like the butterfly.
Like the coffin chasers, let us marry life and death and fly into our fantasies.
But Mother Rafflesia… I don't know how to dance.
Let me teach you, mi amor.
It won't be pretty.
But it will be beautiful.