light and dark

omigod dave.
so i write 4 pages worth of blah blah blog about this trip and he only comments on what i failed to mention! grrrrr!
so fine, couple of cool things i missed before.
during the final song, which was a very gentle, pretty folk song about sweet smelling summer days, there was this 2 year old kid hopping and playing around right in front of the stage. he seemed completely oblivious to the people watching him and what a perfect little scf poster child he was, kicking up the dust and scampering around, looking all cute.
i bet his parents trained him all year long to do that. i bet they stayed up late into the night perfecting his jaunty little prance. i bet that was no kid at all but a midget with 25 years experience in technique acting. thats how totally perfect it was.
the other cool thing, weird and creepy, but very cool, was when the tattooed druid guy pulled out a cloth picture of several men and women standing around a little village, who did not look very happy. it was made (he said) from bits of the clothes of a whole village of people who had vanished "mysteriously" when their land was desired by the government in some tiny latin country, i forget which one. the people have simply embroidered faces which seem to glare accusingly, and embroidered across the picture are the words "¿quién recuerda a gente desaparecida?"
who remembers the disappeared people?
their french-knotted eyes haunt me still.
also i have just looked up the word "eunoia" and have learned that it does not, as i was told, mean "beautiful thinking". in fact it is a little used psychiatric term meaning a normal and healthy mental state.
whatever. what the hell is a normal and healthy mental state anyway? i think it would be a remarkably blessed way to be if one could attain it. it seems like state of beautiful awareness to me. so regardless of correct usages, that is a hell of a word and i am going to try even harder now to bring it into vogue. everyone use that word now, you guys! instead of being paranoid, be eunoid! cultivate a eunoiac state. it seems to imply having ones mind functioning to process awareness, free of conditioned overemphasis of one part or viewpoint at the expense of the whole.
do that, you guys. all, like, 5 of you or whatever that read this. try it out, both the word and the state. share your experinces with this experiment.
you know i will.

Eunoia

Eunoia. Beautiful Thinking.
This weekend I dragged (his word) Dave to the South Country Fair. He bore it all in good humor I must say.
The South Country Fair is a magical event that takes place once a year in Ft McCleod where some 500 poets, hippies, artists, hillbillies, musicians and so on gather to make some noise.
I am so covered in mosquito bites I want to tear off my own skin.
What you have is 2 stages, the main stage and the east stage, one tent devoted to spoken word poetry, one awareness tent for yoga, chanting, drumming, gardening etc., several food vendors, and a huge camping area in the trees with little villages built haphazardly of tents, trailers, campers and cars between winding dirt roads. It is next to the Old Man River, which the hippies whose little community we joined say is called the River of Love since it flooded. Im not sure why since it is much higher, faster and more dangerous than before, but I wasn’t going to argue.
I was disappointed not to be able to swim but I was later shown a place where it was safe to do so, though the water was icy and we had to trek for 15 minutes through deep, mosquito infested brush to get there. This was the second morning, however, by which time I was really in need of a good rinse.
As we walked I looked down at the heavy, soft mud with brand new baby willow trees sprouting up everywhere in it. I realized how far this river must have flooded as we walked and walked over the newly deposited earth. It made me think of Egypt, and the Festival of the Tear, as the Nile flooded, and reinfused, rebuilt, the soil.
At night when the awareness tent closed up and it got dark, they projected films by local artists on the side of it. The best was a cartoon called Mr. Reaper’s Very Bad Day, all about Death trying to catch a bus to Calgary to do his job there when a meteor falls from the sky and destroys it while he watches from far away. He takes it out on a flower which pops through the pavement at his feet, but which keeps popping back up no matter how many times he slashes it down with his scythe. The flower is singing Beethoven’s 9th, the Ode to Joy in a lovely tenor. Finally Death blasts it with nukes, and it returns gigantic and mutated with several blossoms which all sing in weird harmony. It was great. It was later shown without sound projected over slides of war scenes while a standup bass player and a trance dj who also played a thing kind of like a theruman but all vibrate-y, did weird music and a poet shouted verse in the middle with the scene projected over him.
The first night Dave went to sleep early like a big lightweight, after pitching our tent near some people who had big signs all around proclaiming that they were the Hoo Devils. I remembered them from the last fair I went to. A big group of old hippies and their kids, who wore tie-dye and batik and scruffy denim and played music till dawn after the stage performances ended.
I don’t know how Dave slept that night, because after he went to bed I went and sat at the campfire and befriended them all. One of the first things they asked me was if I played an instrument, which I did, a drum, which I was then ordered to go get since there were no drummers there. It was already 2 am when this happened and I was almost ready for bed myself, but I went and got the drum and played with them until the sky became light.
This is what real folk music is like, cram as many instruments around one campfire as you can, and make sure you have a guy like George, who knows and loves nearly every song ever and can make any one of them into a bluegrass tune. We had 3 guitars, 1 mandolin, a washtub bass, a maraca shaker and me. Others came and went. I was impressed with myself for being able to keep up at all, and by the end of the night I was dubbed "the relentless drummer". I fell minutely out of time quite often, but no one noticed or cared. When I finally went to bed they booed at me and insisted I come back the next night.
The next day it rained and rained and I was depressed about that but got up and went out with Dave who was kind enough to hold the umbrella while I bought coffee from a vendor and we made our way around the fair. I received a painful and unexpected shock that morning. I noticed a book of poems in the merchandise tent written by a friend I hadn’t seen in quite awhile, who brought me to my first sc fair and helped me a lot in getting over the very intense writers block I suffered at the time, which has not returned since. I said "Oh good! Is he here?" the vendor said he thought so. I took a program and wandered in the direction of Lotosland, the poetry tent. I scanned the program for his name, and found it. It said there would be a memorial reading in his honor at 9pm that night. I found this hard to fathom and thought (as we always do at these moments) that there must be some mistake. Perhaps he just hadn’t been able to make it to the fair?
I was unable to ask anyone when I got to Lotosland, as 2 of the poetry coordinators were celebrating their handfasting. As I stood witnessing this beautiful ceremony of uniting (which was already the 3rd time they had repeated it, they were doing a tour to include everyone they knew at fairs like this across the country) I scanned the assembly and realized that it was probably true, he was probably dead, memorials are not held for living people.
I tried to rationalize my feelings about this, I had, after all, not seen him for 2 years. I tried to concentrate on the ceremony, the poetry of the vows, the beauty of the moment. I was overwhelmed and wept silently as the couple was bound together.
Afterwards I approached, after everyone had congratulated the couple and there was milling around and chatting a walked up to the man and asked him what had become of Steve. He told me he had died of a drug overdose in a hotel room in Vancouver, nearly a year before. It was believed to be intentional, though no one really knew for sure. I struggled for a moment trying not to burst into tears, failed, and was enfolded in the embrace of the many people who knew exactly how I felt. This man was loved at the South Country Fair.
I was invited to read in his honor at the memorial service after I explained what he meant to me creatively. I read a poem, which is posted earlier in this blog, about the dancing skeleton. Steve was the person who had told me it was a poem, and in light of the news I had received, it took on whole new meaning.
The rain let up in the afternoon. Dave and I made masks in the awareness tent. They told us to make a mask that reflected an element or a being that we wanted to be and tell them something from the perspective of that being. I made the sun, and Dave, without looking at what I was doing, made the moon.
Then we went and walked the labyrinth. A labyrinth is a big diagram that in this case was mapped out in stones on the ground, marking one winding path to the center. It is used for a walking meditation. At the center was a stone altar with various offerings placed on it, stones and flowers. I have walked one before which was a big mat inside Knox United Church. This one was beautiful. I wound my way to the center to the hypnotic music coming from the east stage. 2 men were doing tai chi with swords on the hillside. We all fell into one rhythm. The whole weekend was like that.
The awareness tent was hosting a drum circle later that day. I brought my own drum, but could not resist trying out the great big djembe that was with a bunch of drums to be lent out to those who did not have their own. The facilitator wasn’t there yet, so I set my drum down in the middle and started playing the big one. One man joined me, then another, then a few more, then we had a crazy rhythm and people just started packing in with their drums and sticks and bells and whatever they could make noise with, one guy had a digerido.
Because I had the biggest drum, I guess, I got to sort of lead the rhythm. I didn’t notice at first, but I gradually realized that if I changed anything I was doing, the whole circle changed. If I got funky, pretty soon we were all playing funky, if I went slow and hypnotic, soon we were all trancing. This went on for 20 minutes before the facilitator showed up. I could tell who he was right away. There is something about every drum circle facilitator that makes my teeth ache. Being a good drummer is partly about commanding rhythm, keeping time even when others fall out to keep the sound cohesive and give people a place to pick up from. However its also about feeling for the groove and working with what’s already trying to happen. Drum circle facilitators are great at the first and clueless on the second, in my experience.
So the guy stood there, radiating the desire to take over everything, and we ignored him. Finally he clapped his hands together and started talking over us. Did not attempt to get our attention first, just started yelling. He irritated me, can you tell? We moved outside and spent the next 2 hours playing like he told us to, every time we would get into a decent groove he would stop us and make us do something else. I guess its good to know what a samba is, but I only just wanted to play. At least I got to keep the big drum for the whole thing, since someone else grabbed mine, and I just let them, cause I had the big drum. I need a big drum.
Anyway, mostly good times. That night there was more jamming and I got to just play all I wanted then. Its funny how much fun you can have playing music you don’t even really like. Dave hung out and entertained the girls that showed up.
Security finally came and shut us down around 6. By this time the sun was fully up and doing that wonderful thing it does only in the early morning when it is low slanting through the leaves and gilding everything it touches, lighting the depths of everyones eyes so the irises seemed to glow. I opted not to go to bed, but Dave did.
All through the night there had been a young man by the fire that everyone regarded as kind of ADD and not to be taken seriously. He kept saying everything that I was thinking. All night long I would be musing something to myself, about the weird déjà vu I kept experiencing all night, or some point of philosophy that I could not have expressed if I tried at that time. I would hear him trying earnestly to explain it to someone next to me. it was weird. At about 4 am I suddenly looked around me and realized that I was sitting just barely above the mud, in a village of trailers, with a bunch of hicks playing hick music and me trying desperately to keep up on my drum, and I felt a little ridiculous suddenly. I was about to put the drum down and go to bed and then this guy comes up to me and takes my hand, and he says, " You know how everyone is trying to get somewhere? What if where you’re supposed to be is where you are? I mean, it’s the only place you can be, when you’re there. Its always beautiful if you can see the way to see that."
I stopped feeling dumb and remembered that it was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Im still only on the second night, 3 pages later.
I never went to bed, I danced to sweet funky jazz in the sun, I bathed in the river and luxuriated in mud. I reunioned with another dear old friend that I met at the last fair. I sang chants to the goddess in the awareness tent and then wandered over to the main stage to groove to bluegrass gospel. I sat with a druid sage who sold stones and jewelry from the back of his Oldsmobile and taught spiritual lessons using his own body, covered in tattooed symbols and glyphs, as a blackboard. I sang to him and his daughter when something he said made me think of a song I knew.
The purpose of the fair, for me, is to unlock creativity and release inhibition. I go around lecturing people constantly about their responsibility to themselves and the world to manifest their creative ideas. I believe that the creative impulses that come from the depths of the soul are sacred gifts, messages from the divine, and not to express them is sacrilege and dishonor to the gods.
So many people hang around waiting for someone to tell them the right way to express. They do not realize their own personal authority. They are afraid of doing it wrong. They don’t realize that individual people invented everything they currently have, and that they did so by honoring and expressing their creativity. Had they stayed in the shadows waiting for the validation of others, we would still be waiting for the wheel.
The words that occurred to me to express this are "I am responsible for creating the perfection of experience I expect from the world." I will never be bored or disappointed with anything if I remember this. If I am not happy with the music I am hearing, I can make my own that I do like. If think the story is boring, I can make up a new one. All weekend long I found myself participating more fully in group things than I ever usually do. When we sang chants I began making harmonies that would simply not have been there had I chosen not to show off what wicked pipes I have, and others got the idea and did it too until we had a glorious song of praise instead of a monotonous chant. We never would have gotten to have a real drum circle of free expression had I not taken it apon myself to begin it. No one looked at me and said, "who the hell are you to go making things happen?" Hardly anyone looked at me at all, and that’s the weird part, they just responded to me.
As I wandered dreamily down the path toward the end of the festival a woman I passed smiled at me, held out her hands and said "Isn’t this a perfect moment?" Which was exactly what I myself had been thinking.
When it was finally all over I tracked down the man who had been the first to welcome me to their campfire. He was the washtub bassman. He gave me a wonderfully warm goodbye hug. The jammers were beginning already and he rocked me while humming to it and I started humming with him, for just a minute, and then he said "Now get outta here and go do it for real."
So here I go.
Stay tuned.

getting up on the soap box

This is where it starts to get intense.
After reading a friends blog entry on theology and spiritual evolution i realised I had a lot to say on the subject myself. Some is in response to those statements which were made from a christian perspective, by someone who I quite respect, and some simply a lot of stuff that has been rattling around in my head for years needing a semicoherent expression.
This is really long, so it will help make up for my laziness in posting. Another gargantuan post on a different but related subject is coming soon.
It is a common perception that paganism is barbaric, primitive and unrealistic, practiced by power hungry individuals with overactive imaginations. It lacks maturity and critical objectivity. This is, unfortunately, a largely accurate picture, as any stereotype is. A stereotype, however, never accurately reflects the essence of the thing it is generalizing.
There is such a thing as fundamentalist paganism as well. Worldviews just as rigid as those of the stodgiest practitioners of organized religion are commonly seen in even the more reputedly enlightened members of our community. In paganism, as in any aspect of human culture anywhere, there are those who become stuck at a certain level of development and cannot conceive of there being anything beyond it.
Spirit has an objective reality independent of our individual awareness of it. In the beginning, we are not aware of anything not immediately confronting us, and that we struggle to understand. Our minds begin eventually to associate one experience with another, cause and effect. I am hungry, I am cold, I am wet, I am alone. I cry out and Mother comes. Mother comes and I am fed, warmed, dried, loved. This is a true understanding, but an incomplete one. Mother does not exist solely to care for me. She will not always come when I cry out. She will not always give me what I want when she does come.
We begin to learn that certain actions have certain consequences. We learn new ways of propitiating Mother, by crying louder or by being good, obedient children. As we progress we gain a more complete understanding of the nature of the Mother. Our perception of all things becomes more complete. We begin to see the greater world beyond our immediate surroundings, and we come to understand that there are higher forces that the Mother is subject to. We begin exploring and addressing ourselves to them.
Many people do not leave the childhood state of simple pursuit of desires. Many do not see beyond their own experience to the shared world and the influence of their actions upon it, except insomuch as it yields their desires to them. This is as true of the "Sunday Christian" who goes to church and prays for the benefits of it (ie; salvation, blessings, social acceptance etc.) as it is of the self centered pagan who thinks nothing of magickally rearranging the universe to satisfy their wants, or at least bragging about their ability to do so to swell their own sense of importance.
It is not, in my opinion, a separation from the self that is required to move beyond this, but rather the expansion of the concept of the self to encompass more of reality.
We begin to see beyond our immediate needs and desires to the greater world, and the greater good, ideally. We begin perhaps to show compassion and consideration to the Mother rather than simply taking what she has to offer. We begin to see good behaviour as more than simply a means to manipulate rewards out of our surroundings, but as correct and in harmony with the needs of the collective of which we are a part, which is an intrinsic part of us, and our creator.
What I am describing here is not only the growth progress of a child into maturity, but also personal spiritual development and cultural evolution. How we have come from being primal animals to deifying nature, to personifying impersonal forces, to associating our experience of the divine and intangible with what we are already familiar and comfortable with.
The point I started this making was merely that Spirit, and the nature of Spirit, exists independently of our level or mode of awareness. There are many different ways of perceiving truth, but it remains the same in essence.
The one Reality that transcends all realities is a single microscopic point at the center of an infinite sphere of possibility. The center is always the center, and the only fixed point in the sphere. It is the only vantage point from which the entire circumference is visible and conceivable. If you try to separate your awareness from the sphere and look at it from further away, you can only see half of the surface at most.
This is still a more advantageous perspective than clinging to the surface, where we see only what is before us. From this close up we perceive the ground as flat and it is difficult to imagine the totality of possibility.
As we grow closer to the center, to the source, which generates its surrounding realities, we begin to realize a few things:
We ourselves are microcosmic reflections of the macrocosmic truth. We are created in God’s own image and therefore, by understanding ourselves, our own deepest natures, we come closer to understanding the nature of God. This suggests that we have creative powers.
This also suggests great responsibility inherent in that power. It also allows us to begin to empathize with God as it becomes clearer and clearer that the divine is our source, and part of us. We come to understand that we are part of the whole ourselves, that what appears to be a collection of individuals is actually one Body composed of many cells. . This awareness seems to take us outside of ourselves, to recognize the concerns of other beings and our responsibility to the whole.
Then we realize, as science teaches us, that the blueprint for the whole is contained within each cell and we begin to recognize ourselves as beings of infinite possibility. The individual cell is not the whole, and yet all the information for recreating the body is contained within it. The nucleus of the cell is the Divine Spark.
As above, so below.
It is this awareness which gave rise to the Wiccan Rede, the only hard and fast rule of modern paganism. If it harm none, do as thou wilt. Many ceremonial magicians shorten that to simply Do as you Will. This sounds terrifically selfish and irresponsible unless it is recognized that the Will being spoken of in this case is the will of the Soul, the center of individual being, which is in perfect alignment with the Will of God, the center of the All.
Coming from this angle spirituality becomes more a process of reduction than a process of growth. Stripping away the layers of conditioning imposed by the necessities of mortal existence to access this core essence. If you could live entirely as this essence, you could do no wrong, but that is not what mortal experience is about.
Magic, then, becomes less about forcing the universe to your will and more about aligning your consciousness and energies to the possibilities already existing. Magic is not an egotistical demand that your wishes be granted, but an act of affirmation of your openness to the correct manifestation of your highest good. You cannot see with your eyes closed, you cannot receive with your hand closed. Magic is for opening both, allowing yourself to experience the potential for fulfillment that exists already.
I have often gotten results far quicker than expected when doing spellwork. In far less time than it would take for the influences to rearrange themselves, things start to happen. Therefore it was already set to happen, but may not have happened to me had I not attuned myself accordingly.
The ironic thing, of course, is that the more closely you are in alignment with the Divine Center, the less concerned you are with the exact form that fulfillment takes. Also the less important the symbol becomes in the face of the reality it represents.
When we first learn magic, many of us will put great stock in the objects and imagery we use. We think that our actions will yield literal results, and that everything will happen as we say. The tools and symbols we use are there to speak to the subconscious mind, where the decisions are made as to what we will allow into our sphere of conscious awareness. Magic works because it disarms conditioned conscious objections which conflict with the change in awareness we are attempting. It is not guaranteed to work, its success depends largely on our willingness to surrender to the larger forces at work. More and more we come to realise that we cannot force anything, and magic becomes as humbling as it is empowering.
When we invoke archetypal personifications of primal forces (gods) we acknowledge that influences exist outside of ourselves which may or may not cooperate with us. We are expressing our wish to act in harmony with the preexisting structure and asking expressed approval of our actions. We offer service to them in honor of the realities they represent.
These gods may not have had objective existence in their personified forms until they were believed in by so many people, but over time those associations were reinforced over and over until a thought form was created. The thought form, given life by belief, can take on an existence of its own.
The principles behind the thought form will continue to exist and retain their validity, even if one particular expression of that principle is forgotten, and the archetype will resurface with a different name and face. These principles are conscious emanations of the central intelligence. These emanations are called angels by some, gods by others. We call on them, and they help us.
The virgin Mary performed no great feats in her time, other than an apparent virgin birth, but billions of Catholics since have attributed all manner of miracles to her intervention, and with each one her influence and power grows in the minds of her believers. She was a mortal woman, but came to embody the Mother principle, the sense of someone who cares for us and feeds us the necessary strength to grow. This is the first and oldest concept of god, the One who creates life.
If one is able to see past the literal interpretation to the essence expressed in this concept, it becomes more condensed, more simplified, more a truthful and accurate expression of the center we are trying to reach which transcends all the definitions we attempt to cage it in.
To summarize, primal archetypes retain their validity to the deep self no matter how far we evolve from the original concepts and mindsets that formed them, because they represent the earliest conscious human understandings, which formed the foundation on which all further thought was built. If we had somehow begun by formulating different archetypal concepts, we would be an entirely different species by now.
As we evolve, our awareness will become sharper and more refined. Truth is real unto itself, and shows itself to be so if you simply look at what youre seeing and understand it as itself. The nature of God is the nature of everything.

you know, what i find is, if you just sit down and write something, the writing will happen. it may not be about anything, but you sure are writing. look! here i am, writing.
today i did an entire page on my book, after moaning that it was dwindling. i have even cooked up some extra unpleasant and miserable trials for my favorite character and have begun to see the next few pages ahead.
hammer, in case youve lost track, i am about 100 words away from my present, thanks.
this is making a very good case for what i said before about stream of consciousness writing, which by the way that author does not know what she is talking about when she insists on handwriting. i can type way faster and get a lot of words out before i really have a chance to think about what they mean. its like automatic writing. you just let yourself type whatever words in whatever order they come and censor nothing. its good for you.
i went to the stampede and actually managed to have a really good time for a change, thanks in part to agreeable company and benevolent weather. im still a big sucker for fireworks.
the world is a wonderful fun place for me right now. the summer has been so sweet to me already and its only barely started. i feel a lot of magic happening. i have started to realise what all i am capable of learning, and i am excited.
heres another poem!
consciousness a stream that runs rapid screaming from my mouth like blood desire arterial thrust a hammer cocked to fire lusting for the target impossible to forget depending on how far you get dont let it run (away with you) rabid half starved junkyard hounds blinded fury unbound yearning turned to twisting tighter lightly savage gently vicious no resisting to my kisses yield i know you yearn to lose all in this burning

being a creator goddess isnt all bad

this is becky. she looks like how i feel sometimes. beautiful and kinda freaked out.

dancing in the dark

well at least now im falling into a kind of 2 week rhythm.
its not that my life is dull, its that its too full of underlying controversy to blab cavalierly about here. conflicting emotions and egos make it so not worthwhile to get into my personal life, at least where it concerns other people.
so, what else is going on?
the book is decidedly stalling, or i am. the depths of sick depravity my mind can go to is upsetting even to me. considering i am digging into that as deep as i can, its not surprising that i am a little uncomfortable with the process. i do not want my characters to be so unkind to each other. i do not like this cold bleak world i am creating. i understand the way some people are crushed and pruned and twisted into the ugly shapes they become far too well. the process of conditioning someone to become little more than a source of energy to be milked or a vehicle to be driven to its eventual destruction. its fucking diablolical and tragic and too real for me sometimes. my characters have become people i care about and i do not want to torture them this way for the sake of the story. i, the author and god, have become the vampire i am denouncing in this same tale, using their energy and driving them toward their fates with merciless intent for my own ends. i want everyone to go for a picnic and have a nice time and forget there ever were such things as astral vampires. except that if you ever forget for even a second... theyll get ya.
besides, nice times make a sucky novel.
see why i am stalling? how many other authors actually become paralysed in their sympathy for their own characters i wonder. how many authors hesitate to write the real story in their heads for fear of what may be uncovered or unleashed in the process. probably lots. this stuff can change you as a person.
thats a thing i discovered when i started doing a daily stream of consciousness journal entry. i read this book called the artists way, which is full of good suggestions id never bother following. the one and only one i did follow, for quite a long time, was the morning pages. 3 pages of longhand writing, uncensored, as soon after waking as possible. it clears the mind marvellously, but you can do a lot of deep digging in 3 pages. i didscovered things inside my own head, wonderful and terrible, that i did not know were there. so i dug deeper. i tell you this, its a good way to clear the mind but also a good way to drive yourself just a little nuts.
so in compromising between allowing the words to come as they will and actually directing the story as i will, i am getting into a whole new section of my psyche which is dangerous and wierd and beautiful. shes a mean one, this vampire/god/author thing i have discovered in myself, and she spares no one. my apologies for those of you who are being unwittingly exploited in this little project of mine. except to d, who deserves it all and worse.
here is another poem, the most recent one i have written, 2 months ago or so. it kind of reminds me of a thing my ex fiance tried to explain to me about himself long ago. iyelli, if you still bother to read this (dont feel bad if you have given up, im a lousy blogger) read it to him, i think hed dig it, at least as much as he digs anything he didnt write himself.

i have a sweet romance with death
oh how i love to dance with death
when we go gliding cheek to bony cheek
i cannot catch my breath
he holds me tight
so fast we go!
He twirls me round and dips me low
the squirming things i see below
the swirling hem of his black cloak
cause me to squirm in answer
my love is quite a dancer
i reach to kiss the seething grin
he smells of sin and new life bingeing on the old
his hands are cold
i long to feel them on my skin
i long to give my self to him
surrender up my everything
an offering to his majesty
my lord of loss and tragedy
the sweet gift of finality
i lust for
he refuses me
and smiles as if amused
i know i have done wrong by him
only rape can satisfy him
he has so many willing lovers
i curtsey to his bow
and step aside
to watch him choose another