Noel-John Whipps

Stained in White

Sleepily my hand reaches for the phone beside the bed. Cream coloured it lies gripped in my hand. The voice and tone alert me to a world outside my dreams. The troubles have occurred, the silence is shattered and the softness replaced with the hardness of reality, pressing heavy and pallid like the comforter which has turned leaden and tangled under my hands. The cries are heard outside my window as though the birds have heard the news and want to spread it through this detached world. The hand that held the knife, what happened to that? When did this town work itself into such fervours of mischievous activity? What can I do now? What do they need of someone half asleep and pulled into pieces by the projects he has wound himself through. The light, like vines, twists itself through the panes of the glass, a single stray beam plays across my white hairy chest and the comfortless softness of the bed beneath me lays blank.

Stabbed straight through the heart,
Awakened to bloodless skies
Seeking guilt free ground.

I can’t concentrate on the pain in the voice, because if I do I might break down and cry again. I cried enough last night, knowing that I had driven you there, knowing that I had taken you to a place where you were just another face in the crowd, another body in the mass, another pale limb of the many headed techno driven monster. I told myself, you were going to take a taxi home; you were going to get a ride before the sun touched the sky. You were staring at the sky when they found you, looking at something higher than yourself. Something you couldn’t seem to reach through the worries clogged within your brain. The white dress you were wearing is almost stainless despite the dancing and drinks.

Striking at the vein
Silver flashes, plastic clicks,
An angel explodes.

You were just another faceless junkie, another blameless number, a person lost to the terrors of anonymity and the lack of family. The news goes and lays itself across the papers that fly with deceptive straightness to my home. It will linger this day untouched, it will stay for the neighbour’s dog to chew through, hoping to find an innocent abandonment in this careless act, one that I can’t seem to gain again. I come back to see leaves and wings of black and white spread across my lawn and inside I set the one last gift I will give you on the table.   

The new white roses
Their scent floating out across the house
Saying their goodbye