Funeral

Roaring...prowling...clawing at the air...my teeth sink into nothing. Restless and irritated at the buzzing of flies, I snap, glaring and red-eyed. I'm daring a fight that won't come. Ah, Gods!

It is the last day of the year...moments ticking away as any other day, but the last of this precise slice of time. I want it over with, and yet, I cling to it with the other had like a child. Not a bad year...nothing like that. Balancing the scale of judgement, it slips between my fingers, spilling everything. And the blood still pounds relentlessly in my ears as a mad drummer in a padded cell...unheard by anyone.

I torment myself and I do it well. Wishing myself awash in canvas and paint, carving out pieces of recognizable dreams from clay chaos. Instead...

I'm choking on words, banging the letters of a keyboard until my fingers bleed. The atmosphere is cloying like a bowl of long dead flowers floating in skum. Funerary in spirit and attitude, we carve the seconds off the old years carcass, pretending it savory instead of sour.

Mourning jewelry has always becomed me.

Do You?

Dark. Muggy and no clouds in sight. Languid, but tranquil in the dusky light as I lay across the sofa.

Thoughts of the wind and the rain and the water. Always the rain and the green grey sky of a September afternoon from years ago. Wind howling and the lightening scattering like cat scratches across the dark and troubled sky. You remember...

remember it like it was yesterday...moments ago and the thoughts pour down just like the rain did that dry day...we hadn't had rain for months and were praying for it....

Ocean waves, the muted green silk frothed with water lace rippling on the rocks at the back of the Sutro cave rippling as my skin in the cold of the fog splintering my nerves on tiny skewers. The shell, pink and white and oh, so fragile, lay in your hand as you thought in the dry, white heat of the desert....you couldn't say a word...not to anyone...but I knew....

knew like the lines that cross my palm or the hunger at the end of the day...hunger coming in waves...the heat of the day rising in mirage from the asphalt...making you think...

wonder.....

why the spirit dances in the dead of night when no one but the stars see...whirling under the branches to the scent of roses and leaves crisping in the summer heat...you are a voyeur, aren't you ...I've said that before , but it's true...like it or not.....yards of cloth sway in breezes and body movements that leave you drunk with desire and longing to touch...you won't...won't allow yourself to do that...and she knows...can feel your breath on her neck down her arms...the breath that is the wind carrying her in the dance...your heartbeat marking the tune as her feet glide and she twirls leaf-like in your heart...is alone and will be so through time...so close you can feel her, smell her scent but never touch her...make her yours...she pulls off the veil to reveal your own face looking back at you and you flinch and then realize she is a mirror and you are the mask...forever hiding from yourself and from her....and you believe in your safety and you believe you are untouched by your desire.....alone in a confessional the little panel slides back to reveal...what?

...staring at the screen only shadows beyond and you still won't reveal it...won't tell you the truth until finally the desperation drives you dizzily down the wire and YOU tell her what you have longed for...what you wish and what you fear...and there is silence greeting you...is she listening...eavesdropping to what is said between the lines...and she softly tells you to light a candle for her soul and say 3 Hail Marys..because surely you are driving her to a hell of your...her own creation clawing at the bedsheets and howling into the dark...unheard

what is this thing that makes you think

you are so civilized?

Each grain of sand drops down. I look to the stars and see they are there ...constant...grasses green going golden in the heat of days. Like the grasses I, too, am parched and growing brittle with time.

Breezes turn to blasting winds, pulling up the grains of sand and wearing everything smooth and hazy in my soul. Cycles of wind and rain and brutal sun paint my days in canyon colors. Wearing down the harshness and wild insolance of my youth to a deep, mellow humour.

Something in the dark of the cave beckoned me, and yet I was frightened. I couldn't go yet; couldn't plunge into the cool depths escaping the blazing sun of late spring. Going below ground is a sacred thing for a Druid. You are travelling to the land of the Underworld and all the blessed dead. It is a trip not taken lightly, for if you emerge you are returned to the living world forever changed.

It wasn't what was in the cave that struck me with fear. It was myself and the doubts ... unworthiness. I have learned wisdom and abused power all in the name of love and passions that drove me nearly mad. Power is returning now and I am afraid of not it, but myself. Barren of it by choice for so many years, I come back to the world of true magick and find myself more a novice than the sorceress I was.

Be careful what you wish for...holding crystal to the moon...I realise my time has come. There is no death only cycles moving into the next phases of our eternal lives. Childlike, I will take my offerings and enter the cave.

You Do Not

You do not know me

You suppose

guess

conjure

judge

and assume

but....

you

do not know

me

You never asked me

about my

deepest loves

my passions

or the greatest tragedies of my life

You know my face

my laugh

my smile

my scowl and my anger

but

you

do not know

me

Me

as I am in the moments

such as now

Me

when I muse

silently

quietly pushing aside cobwebs

to peek at memories

of the past

what I have seen

and known

Who I am

I have kept to myself

and share

with the dead

whose tongues

are

silent

(Only a few really know me...the rest see what I want them to see.)