Pagan Poetry

“Even in this hell fire the lotus flower blooms”

You’ve got to get your hands dirty and dig deep, reach into those dark places, transmute the shadow into radiant light. We need to perform emotional alchemy, like soul surgery. “You gotta go through the mud to bring forth the lotus,” she quotes Siddhartha as I reference the blueprint encoded within a copy of my nuclear memory.

All I can feel in this space of rejection & silence is swirling black lilies, so empty of any light that they spiral into shame circles; circles among circles of intergenerational hurt. The overlap is stunning to behold.

In Alaska they spotted a spiral of light in the sky and attributed it to a rocket, but in my heart of hearts I know it was her, the infinite Gaia. Gaia and the vibrational frequency between us.

I close my eyes while my partner mumbles incoherently and somewhere, perhaps in the lobby outside our door, the junkies are filling their veins with black flowers too. I can hear them thrashing as she stirs in her restless sleep like all the secrets we wish to keep buried as small seeds inside us, until that day comes:

“when the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom.”

“On the surface simplicity
(Swirling black lilies totally ripe)
But the darkest pit in me
And it’s pagan poetry
(Swirling black lilies totally ripe)
Pagan poetry.”

#SylviaPlath’sEpitaph
#Bjork
#Buddha
#Anais Nin

Black Moon Lilith

This page is intentionally left blank.
I left it there.
You were the cosmos.
I was a canvas of white.
You projected light into the places where I was blind.
In my blindness, I saw only blank possibilities.
The dark was my dialect.
You had not been versed in the shadows.
You were all halo and horn.
You were taurean, Venusian,
the seeker of earthly pleasures.
I was an excavator of the hidden treasures within my own psyche.

Psyche transmuted
Psyche as a flicker of candlelight
Psyche in the 2 am shadows
Psyche in the tarot.

I was the high priestess of the chthonic.

You were all tonic and laughter orchestrating the battle between intellect and heart.

I gave you the stone and you tossed it out across the lake.

I watched myself skipping across the pristine surface of the water.

I saw flashes of myself and heard the ripple effect of my fragmented persona breaking the silence.

Now I walk into the underworld without a guide, banished by Zeus into Hades, a God to my own dead children.

One by one I eat them, swallowing their eyes. Digesting their visions.

Rapid as the eyes of a deer, the images come in and out of me.
Bilaterally, a flicker between
two planets,
two worlds
two small daughters
two fathers
a Siamese birth rite,
A double vision.

An incision in the side,
where I tried
in vain to bandage the damage
of Chiron’s thigh.

You left a triad open in our dyad.
It must have been destined in my Grand trine.

Now I orbit my own outer planets, navigating my way through space as a solo traveler.

Every morning I awake with this pain in my side, where they separated me from you.

It’s my abandonment ache.
My mother kicked me in the ribs
and it left a break in my 12th house.
A black moon Lilith in my Gemini.

Jupiter Descending

Are you afraid of the dark? I think you’re afraid of the dark because your face is white as a moon and I am the sky, I am the sky and he is the sun. I keep seeing your projections on me. You cannot let me be. Fill me up with stars. Shoot comets that stay for an eternity and name them after wounded monsters. Monsters so ugly their own mothers rejected them. Monsters who turned to men like Gods and then sacrificed their own immortality to stop the pain of feeling unwanted, the pain of being born into a world of their own impotency.

Kiyâm

• 

You were an infant crying. I was 13 and babysitting while our folks were out drinking together. You had colic and I had no idea of what that even was at the time.

I just held you in my arms and spun in a circle until I was dizzy. I looked in your eyes and you had a dazed stare, but the crying stopped and you fixed your gaze on mine in that curious state.

Maybe you saw the stars.

Maybe in that moment you actualized the power of the universe. Maybe some people are like stars that burn too fast and maybe the world sometimes spins out of control and we can’t get our balance. Whatever the case I held you until the tears were gone and we both remained in that state of kiyâm until eventually you went to sleep.

The Cree word kiyâm is “a root for various verbs meaning to be quiet, to move quietly, to sit quietly and so on. However the “quietness” of the word kiyâm is not just in the action of avoiding making noise. It very much includes a quietness of the spirit, echoed in the body.”

It’s like a point of surrender.

I look back and recall your fits as you grew into a small girl and threw some wicked temper tantrums which could have given my own childhood tantrums a run for their money.

And what I think is many things that are neither here nor there that I won’t ever have the gift of sharing with you except as an echo between worlds, but one is, to ask Mary Daly to give you the definition of spinster, and she’ll say something along the lines of: a whirling dervish witchy web-weaving woman who creates her own time-space continuum.

Long ago, your dad shared a story of your premature birth and his fear of losing you too soon when you had a close call. I never forgot the heaviness of his heart when he spoke of that fear, because that feeling was like a comet which rose in his chest and shot up through the sky.

There are so many comets shooting through the sky now. May they “burn, burn, burn, ” so that those who are “lost and in the dark may see the astonishing light of their own being.”

While growing up, we were told to stop our crying, but some cries are so loud that they tear a hole through the universe and shatter the silence between us.

So many of those cries come through our smiles, those brave faces we are taught to wear like war paint in our battle against the world.

If there is one thing I could tell you now it would be: kiyâm.

Kiyâm.. kiyâm.. kiyâm.

Rest your weary head and may you find peace and comfort among our relatives in the spirit world.

Until we meet again..
Hiy Hiy.

–For B

On reading the diary of Virginia Woolf

A small bird flies into the pupil of her eyes, from where it begins to rise, as her tears fall. The wooded path, down which she travels, on her late night rambles, where the colour of the deer match the brambles. It rises there in green light,flooding through thick curtain, collapsing, wingspent on the forest floor, where it comes to rest in the thicket evermore.

Yesterday she was gold plated, gold is not meant to crack in thin line, where falsity falls from fingers, grasping at quill, until this sentence takes flight, by a height of such altitude, paving way for a depth of demise. The bird in her eyes does not rise any more, will not gather in tangled domesticity, will not show signs of sanity, i.e, does not behave obediently.

She shines the silver carefully, and minds the manner of her tongue, lest it be kindling for flame, as smoky sentences rise from pages, where she leaves behind traces of truth, until the waves open the sea, swallowing her heavily under. Outwards and inwards, with no warning of the incoherent tide within her mind.

New dress replaces old, she says she inhabits it for 10 and 11p, at the table forlornly, she scribbles down her reality, what to me can only be a memory, preceding an emotional Holocaust, as the gas chamber glare of her vacant stare, goes unbroken for a century.

Control, Alt, Delete

You are born in ethereal light, funereal flow through vessel of heart, where  room holds caskets, bassinets, tourniquets, places to sleep, to dream, to waken. On the day of your departure from veins, warmth of crimson, rush of celebration, permeates receptor cells, life the mournful fall, death the joyful rise, pulling coins from your eyes, toll for the boatman, an atheist bent on sinking, cargo of karmic, a vessicle of rebirth, bursting forth, dissolving the old self and its former memories, dreams, hopes, and procreation. Reversal of ego, the fluidity of self. They give you a name, a place, a face, a position between two poles, a selective offering of chromosomes, and then they take it all away, leave you as a blank slate, you the great author, illiterate, inarticulate, mouthing desires, forming fears. Before you get here you are complete, experience erases data-
control, alt delete.

Violation

A voice is an echo on the shores of a river, cry of the loon. It is a new moon, a full moon, followed by the long snows moon. Ice encapsulates our memories as we tread the surface of a deep forgetting. To remember is to drown. My heart lives in this perpetual spring, melting into currents that violate the very rhythm of this cold season.

.

Ebb & Flow

My blood origin is water but thicker than any oil. We were the people of the rapids, always following the tides in and out, as far as they could carry us in our birch bark boats. My grandfather the great Eagle spirit, who could be called on the wind at will, would carry the message of love across the rivers. My father the feathered dancer, always ran with the shadows, ran with the quick horses, wild across the prairie sky, far on towards the high hills, westward to the mountains. He caught the rapids in his veins, the eagle song rushed through him too fast, and I lost his tracks on the wind, it beat quick through his heart like that rabbit on the rails who cried from the weight of the train cutting across his leg. Love is mercurial this is what I chased. I danced with strangers who I hoped could show me deeper into what I felt behind my eyes, spirits passing by like clouds, dark over my head, deer child in storms, under cover of night, crying to the pleiades, snared beneath a thousand shooting stars, willing forward. This is who we are, these are my kin, wild on the hunt, with a scent in us that says love is of this, caught between these river rocks, these feathers, this sky. We follow that scent towards eachother like wild animals marking their journey home again, we will meet at the shore one day. My father visits me in dreams, speaks through the others, offers symbols to guide me closer to the turtle of truth who rises up towards the light. He told me of the 7 teachings, the sacred ways we follow, a path of shells. The beaver works hard to build up these twig towers of hydro electric power that allow us to connect. But the buffalo speaks of respect, tells me “we all have a gift, don’t waste yours, for if beaver did, he would grow long in the tooth and die,” and then we would have a great loss of life, a loss of light to lead us through these dark times.

Silver Lining

Birth is that crystallized moment when form emerging from dark is grown mistakenly into slavery, the brutality where we are hopelessly adopted into a pulsing world without love, delivered into the possessive hands of a stranger, encompassing us in liquid mercury, dissolving as we strive to gather cohesively, the quicksilver self that eludes us our entire lives into the fluid freedom of death’s sterling soul.

A word to be born by

Softly, fully we bloom into these bodies
And boom and womb are atomic.

What can one say for the abrasion of our violent arrival into brighter worlds?

In a field at night I saw my mother gather stars, picking each like a red ripe cherry from the sky

And her smile is what captured me.

That was when I knew I wanted to be electricity in her veins.

I traveled from the world of the cosmic divine, made a steep decline down onto my fathers inarticulate tongue and sang through his ribs as the explosion of white travelers fought for their positions in the atmosphere of her body.

I wanted to be there to greet you first, but darkness drowned you away from my life like a wave and the thirst for strangers followed me like a sexual awakening when the sun burns your eyes and the man by your side asks if it was alright, but you can’t recall his name in the light of day, because they all say they love you, it’s a word used to open the sky, a word to be born by.

Her eyes are a dark cave

Her eyes are a dark cave where I gaze deeply at a thousand stars, traveling in progression through the centuries, a written documentary of our souls. On stone walls I carve out these symbols of affection and she interprets my love for her with searching fingers in the night, tracing those arcane lines into light.

We are each in the other seeking an answer to our own being before the sea rises and washes away our poems, etching our memories like fossils on stones, translating our dreams into beautiful beams that pass from the ash of that dusty distance to our present existence.