Reading skin.

You can read someone like a book they say.
A cliché perhaps, but true I believe.
When I look at him asleep, slumped in the bed you can read the torn pages of a life on his fragile skin.

The rain was easing off and a slice of damp sun oozed through the dimpled glass.
Sharp fragments of light help to decipher scrolling hieroglyphics on a worn body.
Dates and events distorted with the passing of time.
Bravado tattoos are absent, exchanged for old and new scar calligraphy.
In Latin, the medical condition on a piece of blistered skin offers a Braille like weeping read .
Another page, the scientific study of suspect flaws in his DNA.
More chapters on technology, the broken communication problems encountered.
Or read him in Ariel font, an anthology of short stories, by those who knew him...and wish to forget him.

His thin body twitches to and fro.
Fine capillaries swell, spreading like bloated tributaries feeding veins and arteries that surge like foaming waters in spate.
The colours of the Nile rivers once navigated upon dilute as they course back and forth.
In sepia, pictures of the Great Lakes, world oceans and the wild seas, drowning memories.
Black eyes, sunken dry reservoirs, no tears left to replenish.

And what about the other tales his skin reveals.
Page after page with adventures, mysteries, intrigue and written bold...LOVE.
Other bloodied pages stick and resist turning.
Before more could be unravelled he wakens.

' Sorry...I must have fallen asleep...have you been here long... ? ' he slurs his question with a lopsided smile.

'Not long father...the time flies by when you're reading...'