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When Eve plucked golden apple
From supple branch
Her lip curled in sly smile
As Adam looked on, fearful
Teeth rending forbidden fruit
Tasting like wrath and every secret God had ever kept
When those juices dribbled from her chin
Turning to blood beneath her forked tongue
She knew she could set Eden to blaze
Leave smouldering ash where beauty once dwelt
Snake winding up her thigh
Tongue slipping to taste hellfire
Every story ends with her
With woman
With a smile that torches the world
When I say I have been moving mountains recently
I only mean I have found the strength to walk
Dragging my feet like the world itself was strapped to my ankles
Every footfall a thunderclap that ricochets into the belly of earth
Until the great beast in its molten heart
Opens one sleepy eye
And after a millennia of slumbering,
Rises, to walk in my shadow, following the shaking of the dirt
When I say I have been moving mountains
I mean I have found strength, and bade it heel
One monster to another
When I first looked into darkness as an infant
I was swallowed by it
All my days since have been twilight haze
Every memory coated in summer-sunset film
Beating with the soft glow of nostalgia
I have always been the night walker but never the night owl
I do not come alive in the darkness
but am rather
Rocked gently against, and into it
My shadows have shadows and they are all kind
All of them a comfort and a friend
I will step into a void and its yawning mouth will smile at me
I have always been smiling back
Morpheus sets the world to slumber
And steps lightly between dreams
With twine of gold and heavy thunder
He weaves his sleeping schemes
Unmaker! Unmaker!
He takes the nightmare
And spins his tangled web
A heavy cloud is seeping despair
Turning sweetdream into lead
Liar! Liar!
The sleep rebelling
Shaking cobwebs from the mind
Rising slow with dream dispelling
And Morpheus is blind
Iris! Iris!
The rainbow beckons
Against languid drooping head
Sunlight is the fiercest weapon
From slow Morpheus’ dread
Somnus! Somnus!
To bring the father
Leash your changeling son
He obliged, or would’ve, rather
The twisted web had come undone
Coward! Coward!
Does Morpheus hide
In shadows grey and black
Cursed again to now reside
In the tiny twilight crack
My name
A name I always thought dull
And inaccurate
Means farmer.
And funny,
Now
How close it sits on my skin,

I suppose I have toiled
Have pushed fingers into earth
Felt the Mother humming
And I hummed back,
Clenched the roots of the world
Into fists and took from them strength
To rise,
Again
And again

And I suppose I have nourished
Been both soil and the crop
And the blood and sweat that birthed it
I have always been growing ,
Something
Someone
I’ve been spinning sunlight
Like thread on a loom
Have always reaped gold ,
I, planter of bountiful harvest
Sower of sweetened fruit
It is always, Me
To nurture

And look ,
How green the fields are
How well the name fits.
I have stopped with the poems
That liken me to natural disasters
No more hurricanes named after my two syllable tongue
No more tsunamis, destroying every island I found in a person
I don’t want to be a cataclysmic event anymore
No more doomsday’s or end times
Hellfire held in these lips, no
I am trying to become sunlight
To weave it around me like a great gold cloak
To walk in between the sunbeams and learn from them
How to step lightly into others lives
Leaving the place before slightly more illuminated
I am learning from the moon her heavy slink
The drowsy hug of her light and I am taking
All that nights darkness and weaving a glittering blanket
To lay over my loved ones that they may sleep peaceful
Knowing only the kiss of me and my stars
And not fearing the dark or the dawn or what the angry earth could bring them
I have pushed away all apocalypse inside me
Drank of ambrosia and nectar that the heavens guzzle
And made myself the smooth waltz of homeliness
Comfort resting on my two syllable tongue
Washing tides of peace on every island I see  
I am dancing in the solar flares and letting the atom bomb inside me
Erupt into stardust
A wish in every fragment
For my molten blood to quiet and cool,
The rumbling earth of my heart to still,
For sunlight in the fallout that does not burn,
For a new kind of calm, one that heralds no storms
Introducing his lovely assistant
Sequin dress and smiling mouth
From his tuxedo sleeve he pulls a Rose
Presents it to the smiling girl
And bows to the audience who revel, ecstatic, at this small miracle.
He plucks behind her ear and finds another rose,
Another, in the crook of her elbow,
Behind her knee,
All the soft places he touches and drags Flower and thorn from the skin
And the lovely assistant: bleeding, smiling
The audience is in awe.
For his next trick, he tips his hat
A picture of chivalry, a gentleman’s gesture
And blooming from his head is the dove
Off-white and malnourished, eyes wide and fearful
Fleeing the scene like smoke from a burning house
The audience is clapping and roaring and howling
And a silence descends
For his final act, calling on his assistant
With her clipped wings and blossoming body,
He cuts the girl in half
Desecrates and diminishes her
Does it with a flourish and a sweeping of his hand
Makes her less than what her mother made her
And the crowd, cheering, screaming
Leaping from their seats
He takes a bow
And the world is a stage
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