The Black Rose

The piece changes every few years evolving into something vibrant & new!

Original hand written draft on exhibition at the Baltimore Summer ArtScape, 2003

Seen in The Annihilation Fountain of Canada (TAF) , New Years Eve, 2000
Originally printed in Tongue of the Serpent New York City, 1993

My lover appeared the other evening in a dream, asking me, "Why are you choosing to leave when all is going so well?"

"I don't know." I responded candidly, then I lied, "Maybe I am just bored with it all."

He breathed in heavily to hide his laugh. He knew when I was lying and when I was telling the truth. No matter how seriously I took myself or my responses, he could always see right through them. He mentioned casually that suicide was fascinating, and then vivid as though he were sitting right beside me added, "You might want to consider such now that you have left." He laughed, and lovingly he handed me a black rose.

From the dream I awoke, and in a memory I laid. The black rose of silk in the lapel of my black leather coat, a beat up hipster coat from the late 1960's which I got a used clothing store. Sometimes I forget my dreams, but the rose is proof of so abstract a truth as the time in San Francisco when I lived with a Left Handed Black Hat studying the Chaos Theory.

The day after the morning of my dream, he called me on the phone. Three thousand miles were between us practically; that, and too many memories. "Are you coming home now that you no longer mourn your own fears?"

It was my turn to speak., like a verbal game of chess. It matters how each piece of language is projected. "If it won't bother your wife." It hit him like a knife, right in the chest. He was known for not feeling too emotional about anything, yet I was able to find a soft spot. I always could, since the night we first met. It was an act of coincidence that we became associated at all, and very much on purpose that we had moved apart - it would be better if we never saw each other again at all, really, and that reality hit me very hard in the heart. I was about to say more when an image transcended all words; the image of chaos and contradiction which bloomed during our affair - and I, again, felt alive. It was hard for me to feel that way, life simply was not the same since dying.

He was going to say something witty, when instead he screamed me a Bitch, A Woman Child like a Witch; a Woman of Instinct, less the confines I've been told society teaches ? He felt my pleasure I guess, for he resumed his stoic grace. Emotions, though a vital necessity, certainly do have their place.

He then told me that he thought it was absurd that I had tried to blame him for my death. He feels that it would be incorrect. I have to acknowledge that we both are to blame, as we both have this sick fascination with cause and effect. So no one can be blamed. It would be too difficult to find new mates with which we might play - If ever we were to again.

I think I was too young when we started, really. I did not even know the name of the game. I look to the Black Rose, and am lost in another memory. The phone rings again. I'd hung up on him before. Instead of answering it, I walk back into the room of the memory which the rose offered to comfort me:

"The name of the game is three dimensional chess." He stood smiling, as I walked into the room where, throughout the night, he would paint. "With a rotating board, of course!" he smiled, and asked me I had asked him or told him. I said nothing, so he lit another cigarette off of the one he had lit, and he spoke quietly, a bit condescendingly, "The name of the game is three dimensional chess. The board is different than you normally see. You have to envision it within your mind until it is a stable as reality! Now, the colors are all primary, and nothing is stationary - except your understanding of when and where and how it is that you are playing." He sat down on the couch, and pulled out a mirror of fresh Shard. "Now sometimes you are white." He passed me the mirror and a rolled up fifty dollar bill. "and sometimes you black." He motioned to do what was there, and hid the reflection between us.

"The board may spin out of control as you play, and then unexpectedly the other's moves you must claim. What do you think?" It could have been a question about the game or the drugs. It didn't matter, for everything was loaded , and my expression usually defied my respectful, but placid reaction to any of his proposals. "You seem to be puzzled. Too complex a game? Why not think about it for a while, dear." He handed me a small bottle of metallic gray paint. "Go paint a dagger for your ethereal altar." I was dismissed.

And now so was the memory as the dagger I envisioned became so sharp it drew black blood, which then turned into the rose on the lapel of my little leather coat.

The phone still ringing is the only thing that brought me forth the time played mirror. I answered it, and he asked if I yet had use of my hand. Black turned to gray forcing my attention back to the rose. It turned plum then mauve then blazing red before my gaze froze. He did not really care about my hand at all, he simply was bored without me around, and was trying to make me feel in need and sentimental. The girl that I had been would have, as she was a bit of a hopeless romantic. Not a bad quality unless it is taken advantage? When I had laid in fluid death I entered into a dimension not accessible in stagnant life, and now I was not so easily played or swayed. "Are you sorry that you are the one that had purchased the knife?" He laughed because he had taught me how to not merely answer a question, but how not to be the conversation's victim.

As I stared at the rose I remembered blood covering the bed in which we had fucked, and starting to cry unexpectedly I asked him, "Was it seductive or Vile."

Like I said, "Suicide is fascinating," then he added, "And many murderers never make it to trial." Then he repeated my question out loud, "Was it seductive or was it vile?" He finally let his anger dominate him, as it was too difficult to answer. "You know, dear, though the truth may be beautiful, the beautiful is not always true." The line went dead, and I felt a bit more a live again. For the moment I had won. It made me sad that I had to do this, but like he said: Suicide is fascinating, murderers never make it to trial. I wasn't going to take responsibility for my dying on that table. I wasn't the one to blame for the game becoming to hard to handle. This was now life or death for real, absolute survival. The board was spinning as was my head. The rose was black again in the lapel of my coat. My hand on fire, I fell asleep instantly, holding onto myself as though I was a child.

"What are you painting?" I asked him as I walked into the room where he painted throughout the night. I wanted to get high, have him come to bed, fuck for a while. His wife was sound asleep, and I was tired of laying by her side. He said he was going to paint me, but could not find the talent to paint such a crystallized prism of brazen desire. Trapped in the memory like a dream until morning, I awoke crying, my hand throbbing and swollen.

Slow beading tears which he'd never see. He's have called me melodramatic, then painted them in when he missed me. Slow beading tears like the rain on the window the day that I left. It was good, it was, all of that rain. We had stood outside the apartment awaiting a cab to take me to San Francisco Airport. I remember he looked at me so serious, then said, "If I was a pedophile, I could have hired a gum snapping whore." He looked down to me as though I was a child. It was the first time I realized how old he actually was - 36 and I was 23 ? My looking up to him made him uncomfortable. "you still have your rose!" He changed the subject when he saw it bound into my lapel. He gave it to me the night that we met. The cab pulled up before another word could be said. The rain coming down, the lingering mist whispering, "It was seductive, it was, though even he can not admit it?" Though such may seem vile, it truly was all worth while.

As the cab sped to the airport, I remembered the attendants taking me away. It had to be a dream, I kept thinking, it simply had to be a dream. Except that a short while later I was dead at the hospital. I remember a sad looking Asian man dressed all in white, asking, "What is your name, please. I know that you can hear me! Please?" but it did not matter anymore. The game was over. I'd bled right through.

"I love you." I mouthed as I was walked down a bloody trail. My lover stared back with icy un.care. "Bitch!" A cigarette dangling from his lip, way too many drugs inside for the amount of police now on the doorstep. The ambulance lights so bright.

"What is your name?" My lover asked me at the bar the night we met. He smelled as a poison might, like the processing of synthetics. He already knew, so I sarcastically asked if he loved me." I do." He said, then pondered, "But what is love, anyway?" It never occurred to me to ask how he already knew me.

As I lay dying on a table my lover painfully screamed, "You Cunt! I do love you!" See, that is what was not supposed to have happened. We were not suppose to fall in love, it ruined the logic of cause and effect.

Once at the airport, I stepped out into the rain. I was crying beneath the veil offered by the weather. I looked to my hand, and wondered what the fuck we had done. I was in so many states of confined and unpleasant pain in every aspect of my being, that I wondered why I could not have just stayed on that damn table. Instead though, I stood ready to board and jet plane to far away. I was on my way to a small town a few hours from Miami. Far, far away. I dreamt as the airplane carried me away. I remember the attendant asking me if I was okay. I'd forgotten to cover my hand when I was seated, and even with the bandages my fingers stuck out swollen and extremely discolored. Saying I was fine, I passed out in a lucid dream - the Bay completely gone, the desert far behind, the sun rising proudly revealing an angel in the phosphorescent glow. It was as pained as me when it woke to the roar of the engines so loud reverberating within the depths of the clouds - the angel was me! A little girl with a narcissus flower and wings reflecting an image of what I was once, then suddenly I awoke as the woman I'd soon be.

The face stared at me without emotion. "Are you going to write me?" He asked, "Or are you done with your games?"

"But you taught me to play!" the dagger no longer an ethereal painting, but a real ceremonial piece. We were standing in a group in the woods somewhere by the Bay. Everyone was naked. Everyone and no one because they were his circle of friends. I was just invited to the ritual, but never met any of them.

"If you are lonely or simply alone, why not share with me?" He paused and he breathed as he did when he'd come down my throat, "Why not share with me a bit of your aura, illuminate me, enlighten me! I'll take no offense. We'll learn from each other without the confines of false age nor innocence."

We'll never speak again. We revealed too much. We always got along better when we stopped talking, and simply got high and fucked. Maybe we knew each other long, long ago when the ways that men and women communicated were a bit different than in this modern world.

The telephone ringing, I fell asleep dreaming of the death of a single black rose, and a man whom I'd once known.